Striving for success seems like a very natural and healthy thing to do, and so does striving to avoid the opposite: FAILURE. Unfortunately it isn’t all that easy to avoid failure, but even more important: The urge to avoid failure is actually counterproductive. How companies react to success and failure is indeed related to how innovative the companies are. Non-innovative companies Read the rest of this entry »
Water is essential to life on earth, yet humans populate many regions where there is a huge water shortage. If necessity is the mother of all invention it should come as no surprise that the number of innovative solutions to remedy this problem is huge. One of those solutions recently caught my attention; People have literally learned how to catch the water in the air!
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“The single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be”
The hard question of innovation is this: Should we pursue this new idea or not? If you do not move on with it you may be missing out on a great innovation that may bring prosperity to your company, or that key innovation that helps your company survive. On the other hand you may be much better off not pursuing the idea at all. Maybe it will be one of those horrible failures that just sucks the life out of you?
Getting the right kind of input from others before making that decision may be vital.
The words invention and innovation sounds kind of similar, but although the concepts are related to one another they are not the same thing. Both words can be further qualified with descriptive words like Disruptive, Radical, Incremental and Sustaining. Examining all these different concepts and how they relate should make for an increased understanding and better communication. That in turn should lead to better decisions. Here is my 2 cent on how to make it easy to think about these things. Read the rest of this entry »
Malaria is a deadly disease that is caused by parasites that are transmitted when female mosquitoes feed on blood. The disease killed around one million children in Africa during 2008. Every 45 second an African child dies in Malaria. Read the rest of this entry »
The Swedish King Gustav II Adolf was known as an aggressive warrior king. Once upon a time in Sweden that very King allegedly uttered these words
“Next to God the welfare of the nation depends on its navy”
In 1625 he ordered four new warships and the finest of them all was named after the ruling dynasty; The Royal Warship Vasa. Read the rest of this entry »
The rate of innovation is increasing, and have been increasing for a very long time. The rate of innovation even seems to be unaffected by wars! Below I list three big reasons for this. Read the rest of this entry »
In 1874 the german chemist Felix Hoffman wanted to create a new kind of medication; a safe non-addictive drug that would help people addicted to the great painkilling drug Morphine. While working for the medical firm Bayer he was able to synthesize diacetylmorphine. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in 1968 Spencer Silver, a chemist working for 3M, wanted to invent a strong adhesive. The adhesive he ended up with was however very weak. This was exactly the opposite quality that Spencer originally wanted in his adhesive, but he refused to think of it as a failure. The adhesive had other qualities too, such as not leaving any residue when it was removed. Spencer went on to market and even deliver seminars about the adhesive at 3M.
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Herbjörn Wilhelmsen
Innovationstuff 