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<atom:link href="http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><title><![CDATA[Comments on: How Any Business Can Innovate Like Apple]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments</link>
<language>en-us</language>
<ttl>120</ttl>
<description><![CDATA[Yeah, right. Innovate like Apple. You can do it. Sure.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[By: Andy Roy]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90805</link>
<description><![CDATA[Just a quick follow on - a related idea reported in Fast Company:

Excerpt:
So, instead of large pain points, you should spend your time looking for--and addressing--something much more subtle: small &ldquo;tension points,&rdquo; the things that aren&rsquo;t big enough to be considered problems. The challenge, however, is that tension points are usually hard to spot, because the symptoms are easy to overlook. They&rsquo;re not screaming for attention the way &ldquo;real&rdquo; problems are. They&rsquo;re typically little inconveniences that people have grown complacent about.

Link: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664794/four-ways-to-spot-opportunities-ripe-for-break-out-innovation]]></description>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:26 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Andy Roy</author>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[By: Andy Roy]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90754</link>
<description><![CDATA[Having not read the report but only James&#039; blog post, I am sure there&#039;s more there, but at first glance, this appears to be about somehow balancing &quot;incremental&quot; vs. &quot;platform&quot; or &quot;disruptive&quot; innovation. Reading only the summary, it&#039;s not possible to judge what&#039;s unique besides the terminology.

But here&#039;s my big gripe: Why is it always trying to learn from Apple? If there were ever a case for simply throwing up our hands and saying &quot;innovation is magic&quot;, then Apple is the poster child. Rather, for a report that hopes to help the average businesses tune up their innovation process and to help stack the odds in their favor, it is more valuable to hear those untold stories of small, successful innovators.

Does the report give examples of run of the mill companies that don&#039;t have the world&#039;s mindshare or hundreds of millions of dollars or the rock stars of every type of expertise they want to buy?

If so, I&#039;ll look forward to when I have the cash for the report, or maybe I&#039;ll wait for it to come out in book form for $29.99.]]></description>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:00 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Andy Roy</author>
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<title><![CDATA[By: James McQuivey]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90193</link>
<description><![CDATA[Kevin, you&#039;re obviously not a fan, and I don&#039;t expect to change that. I don&#039;t denigrate any innovation writers -- in fact, I&#039;m a huge fan of Clay Christensen at Harvard and have been ever since he came to our Forrester offices in the late 1990s to brief us on his new book, The Innovator&#039;s Dilemma. That was required reading in the graduate strategic management class I taught at Boston University. So I honor all the work they have done and continue to do. 
However, I work with many of the clients who have used Christensen and others (successfully). And one thing that I have watched them fail to do with that information is understand how to prioritize innovation and make it happen in one (preferably shortened) product cycle. When you see Corning glass videos on YouTube, for example -- which a CMO at a billion dollar company proudly showed to me the week it came out as proof that he was focused on the future -- you see products that will take years to come to fruition and that will require massive investment in R&amp;D and infrastructure. On the other hand, the adjacent possibilities I&#039;m leading clients to understand can be enacted today, at lower cost, with a higher potential impact. Not just because they can, but because they must, because in just about every industry I work with, there is someone with no legacy business or traditional cost infrastructure innovating that way to compete with them. Hence my use of the phrase, &quot;the only possible way forward.&quot; 
My apologies if you dislike the phrase or the source, but the situation is not exaggerated.]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:22 EDT</pubDate>
<author>James McQuivey</author>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[By: James McQuivey]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90192</link>
<description><![CDATA[Paul, thank you for adding the references (which are both thoroughly discussed in my report and endnotes, by the way). Neither Kauffman nor Johnson have taken their ideas to the next adjacent level, however, which is to the practice of business innovation. As good as Johnson&#039;s book is -- and it&#039;s spectacular -- he wasn&#039;t interested in helping businesses understand how to apply it to their next product. He was focused instead on helping us all see what kinds of environments (social, political, and commercial) encourage the most idea generation. He did a 400-year survey of innovations to get to that point. All of it is worth reading (in my report, I said, &quot;This is one of the most important books on ideas we have ever read. Go pick up a copy now if you want to have any hope of understanding where your next good idea will come from.&quot;).
I hope that puts to rest any implication that we have not properly respected the source of our ideas. In fact, I expect Johnson would be pleased to see we took his and Kaufmann&#039;s idea to a novel, adjacent space.]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:16 EDT</pubDate>
<author>James McQuivey</author>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[By: Paul Isakson]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90189</link>
<description><![CDATA[The &quot;Adjacent Possible&quot; isn&#039;t a new idea. Theoretical Biologist Stuart Kauffman came up with the idea around 2003, if not earlier (http://bit.ly/o6EU4A). 

Steven Johnson credits him and then uses &quot;the adjacent possible&quot; to apply to innovation in &quot;Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.&quot; As the title suggests, Johnson heavily researched how great ideas come about, which he shares in the book. That book is just about a year old now and is a fairly quick read. 

If you want to understand the idea of the &quot;Adjacent Possible&quot; and it&#039;s history, save yourself $483 and buy Johnson&#039;s book instead of the Forrester report. For a primer, here&#039;s Johnson&#039;s TED talk on his book: http://bit.ly/oDOhXk]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:35 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Paul Isakson</author>
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<title><![CDATA[By: Kevin Horne]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90185</link>
<description><![CDATA[&quot;the adjacent possible becomes the only possible way forward&quot;

Only. Possible. ???

Quite a claim, James. One that denigrates hundreds of innovation practitioners, most of whom wouldn&#039;t go looking to Ad Age nor Forrester for the &quot;definite solution&quot; for innovation.

Not sure why Josh Bernoff had to carry you into this publication, but there was at least one bit of good news with this piece - he didn&#039;t plug &quot;Splinternet&quot; once...]]></description>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:38 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Kevin Horne</author>
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<title><![CDATA[By: Brian Spain]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90178</link>
<description><![CDATA[This reminds me of a more classical support of your argument, James - i.e. the quote attributed to Einstein: 
&quot;The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.&quot;]]></description>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:16 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Brian Spain</author>
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<title><![CDATA[By: James McQuivey]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90172</link>
<description><![CDATA[Phoenix, I certainly respect your right to have your opinion on the topic, but if you have access to the report, read it. You&#039;ll see that it&#039;s different from the reams you refer to because we&#039;ve read them all. And while there&#039;s plenty to respect there, there&#039;s not enough that accounts for the specific ways our brains and our societies are primed to innovate (hint: our companies are designed to innovate in a linear fashion while our brains and societies are not) and then also accommodates the potential for rapid innovation that digital affords. Put these two together and innovating the adjacent possible becomes the only possible way forward -- without it you can&#039;t innovate fast enough. I know I can&#039;t convince you in a blog post comment, I don&#039;t expect to, but I humbly submit there&#039;s more to this than just a cool name. Though the name is definitely cool.]]></description>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:01 EDT</pubDate>
<author>James McQuivey</author>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[By: Astute Observer]]></title>
<link>http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/business-innovate-apple/229141/#comments-90171</link>
<description><![CDATA[Plugging your product much lately? :) There are reams of papers and articles about what makes innovation tick. It&#039;s a line of business study, in industry and academia. Books have been written analyzing Apple. Compared to the volume of wisdom on the subject, this is a smudge on a window of Empire Street Building observed from street level. But hey, &quot;adjacent possible&quot; and &quot;convergent adjacencies&quot; are just so kewl that they deserved their own pedestal piece. Thanks for the cobwebs.]]></description>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2011 07:23 EDT</pubDate>
<author>Astute Observer</author>
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