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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet Molly Dix and Jeff Cope, who run the Open Innovation Advisory Services group at RTI. For those not familiar with RTI, it is one of the world's preeminent research institutes, founded by a group of scientists in 1958
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A big part of my day job is to help organizations with their brand positioning and strategy. So when I read the article in the New York Times this past Sunday about TEDx, the relatively new (and incredibly popular) offshoot of the legendary TED conference, I thought it might be
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On occasion I get the opportunity to speak publicly about some of the things I've learned over the years applying the open source way in organizations. In almost every case, when the Q&A session arrives, I'm greeted with at least one question from a
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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I don't know the answer, but I can tell you that brand positioning not effectively communicated and embedded both inside and outside your organization will definitely not make
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I've never been much for clubs. When I was young, I made a lousy cub scout. I wasn't a real "joiner" in high school or college either (just enough to get by) and I still don't get actively involved in many professional
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Maybe some day we'll look back on the role of the manager in our organizations and laugh. Such a quaint trend. Kind of like having The Clapper in every room of your house, or wearing multiple Swatch watches, or working out to Richard Simmons videos. Each seemed really
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On Wednesday, September 1, opensource.com will be hosting a webcast with Stefan Lindegaard, one of the world's leading experts on open innovation. Sign up for the webcast now Stefan is author of the recently published book The Open Innovation Revolution, and blogs regularly on 15inno.com and
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Daniel Pink published an interesting piece over the weekend in The Telegraph about Netflix's innovative corporate policy of not having a vacation policy. Meaning, employees don't have a set number of days they get off each year, but instead can take vacation whenever they want. From
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This week, those smart folks over at IDEO launched a new project they are calling OpenIDEO. If you aren't familiar with IDEO yet, you should be—they are the poster children for design thinking specifically and 21st century innovation more generally. IDEO has been responsible for groundbreaking designs
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When I hear people talk about how awesome their organizational culture is, I often find myself wondering what sort of “great” culture it is.For me, great cultures fall into two categories: entitlement and mission-driven. Those “best places to work” lists don't usually make a distinction, but I
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Ah, poor marketing. It has definitely been a rough patch for marketing the last few years. From those predicting that [fashionable term X] is the "new" marketing (social media! engagement! community-building! customer experience! design! communications!) to those predicting its outright demise, there are a lot of people looking
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I've been toying around with a new hypothesis. Here it is:Formality in business is dying. Now I am not talking about Blue Jeans Friday and Bring Your Pet to Work Day all of the sudden cropping up everywhere. I've seen very formally-run businesses where people