Originally posted at Trends in the Living Network on July 26th, 2010

MyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.

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Originally posted at Innovation Leadership Network on July 8, 2010

I’ve just finished reading a nice article on IP strategy and open innovation that was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review last year. It’s worth reading because the authors, Oliver Alexy, Paula Criscuolo and Ammon Salter have been doing research in this area for a while and now have a good corpus of evidence about how to successfully manage open innovation. I’ve written a blog post previously on one of Ammon’s papers where he talks about the Gollum effect, where obsessive IP protection shuts down the possibilities for valuable innovation partnerships.

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Originally posted at Blogging Innovation on June 17th, 2010

3GTV is the brainchild of Automated Media Services, and they are putting little screens in stores right next to products they promote and show commercials for those products. The notion of having what amounts to a tiny TV screen next to the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese would have sounded bizarre 20 years ago, not just because of cost, more because we didn’t think of TV screens being in very many places. Screens are everywhere today (mostly because of the low cost) and so we are less surprised to see them at restaurants and in elevators, etc.

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“The map is not the territory” – Korzybski

In 2006, I visited Kyoto for the first time. After walking a couple of kilometers, I realized I was far from my intended destination. Without a map, I was lost. Only after retracing my steps did I realize the map I had seen was not oriented North/South. On this map, North was down and to the right – clearly to the cartographer, another perspective was more important to emphasize.

To solve complex problems, innovators go through a similar process of wayfinding and navigating. To innovate solutions to problems we haven’t seen before, we often need to learn to see old things in new ways. Converging on the true nature of the problem, navigating ambiguity and uncovering the insights that drive innovative solutions, we need to become more comfortable leaving old maps behind and finding new ways of navigating.

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As Chaordix understands, unleashing human potential in the workplace is a delicate balance between two seemingly oppositional human needs. On one hand, all of us want to have the freedom to be in control of our own environment and have a say in determining the shape of the world around us. And alongside our need for freedom, there is an equally pressing human desire – for structure, for clarity of purpose, and for a sense of order to the world in which we live and work. Read More…