Overview: Innovation Strategy

I talk to at least a dozen new entrepreneurs each week and probably review two dozen email pitches. Here’s what to expect the first time you contact me and how to get the most out of it.

I don’t think announcing a seed round to the press has ever been helpful.Here are my reasons:

a downloadable tool for radically efficient machine teaching.

four “stages of control”: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification... The unconscious mind “Incubates” the information collected, and finds connections that lead to “Illumination”... If you arrange your creative work according to these seven categories, you can ease creative insights through the four stages of control.

Ironically, the VC world, having fuelled the creation of computing, is one of the last areas of business to introduce computing to decision-making... Evernote, Spotify, Etsy, Zynga, Palantir, Cloudera, OPOWER... The list featured not only names widely known to the public and leaders of industries, but also high performers such as Ibibo... Twenty p…

ad-hoc collaboration alienates top contributors, gobbles up time, and makes organizations less effective... an exhaustive study from the Harvard Business Review just revealed that, far from a panacea, collaboration is actually productivity poison. Here are some of the frightening highlights:... 3. Collaboration tends to foists work from the incomp…

in an attempt to overcome controversies with the Copyright Reform, some are proposing an exemption for startups... the idea is more of a curse than a blessing... 94% of startup acquisitions were completed by non-European companies, and 70% of the startups were younger than 5 years.

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

The rise of the right is better seen as an early skirmish in a much longer, and far more significant, technology-led restructuring of our politics and society... Crypto-anarchists are mostly computer-hacking, anti-state libertarians ... believe that digital technology, provided citizens are able to use encryption themselves, is the route to a stat…

Innovation Dynamics is the first systematic approach to real social innovation and solving people-problems. Purchase includes a beautifully-designed, printed quick-start guide and 90-days of online access... includes brief, animated instructional videos and an interactive workbook that can be printed for collaboration in teams.

We may see ‘creativity’ as an individual trait... but real creativity depends on a community of likeminded people... what we call creativity is not the product of single individuals, but of social systems making judgements about individual’s products.... Brian Eno calls this community a ‘scenius’—a group of creative individuals who make up an ‘eco…

algorithms don’t provide an “explanation” for their results or the results aren’t “interpretable.”  ... different people mean different things when they ask for an explanation of an algorithm’s results... Surely an algorithm is more knowable than a brain... I can think of at least four types of explainability problems.

consider the three main ways that businesses can or will use AI:• Assisted intelligence, now widely available, improves what people and organizations are already doing.• Augmented intelligence, emerging today, enables organizations and people to do things they couldn’t otherwise do.• Autonomous intelligence, being developed for the future, creates…

From talking and working with founders, a number of websites regularly come up as go-to resources for startups. So we’ve put together a cheat sheet of the 27 best websites and resources for startup founders…

one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S.This week we saw the results.63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward i…

it struck me how much more effective the lean startup process can be for an established firm. It’s much easier to do customer development when you already have loyal customers ... That’s what makes the ideas behind the lean startup so important. Whether you are a startup, an established company or a social enterprise, you need to identify a custom…

we talk with Tom Kelly, a partner at IDEO, about the definition of innovation, how to take back your creative confidence, and the habits that can shape not only your current design team, but the up-and-coming design leaders of the world.

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls....[but] Where do those middle-level employees get that experience and judgment?

Corporations are taking pages from startups, to emulate the culture of a fast-moving smaller company.

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

Venting my spleen a little over on Medium.

Everyone wants to test and learn, so long as it’s failing fast without the failure... to win the award for taking the risk, so long as it wasn’t risky... Innovation is sweaty, risky, terrifying and takes balls... Innovation is the opposite of what we are pretending the word means.

there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did... How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? ... a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms... including a meeting with one of the great philosopher…

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

there are a number of companies looking at ways to apply AI, machine learning and related concepts to recruiting... we see glaring limitations to applying machine learning and AI to screen candidates based on their CVs and social media profiles alone... CVs alone fail to capture individual performance and contribution, raw talent, actual competenc…

As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems... training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data.... As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data ... The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance... But access to data is only one way in which M…

innovation is a series of steps, and that innovators possess certain characteristics... Almost everybody [has] innovative traits... the ability to think abstractly, having deep and broad knowledge, curiosity, openness to risk, grit, and dissatisfaction with the status quo... seek out experiences to put those traits to use