In Auckland, there’s some discussion now about building a light rail system. Like many topics that are open for public discussion, interested residents can have their say in online forums, and of course they do – with comments like More ...

Facebook has recently been reminding me that, five years ago, I went on a holiday to Sri Lanka with my parents and my sister.

Among the many enjoyable moments was spending time with two of my aunts, who I hadn’t seen for more than 30 years. More ...

I’ve been speaking to a lot of organisations recently about innovation, and I reckon we’re getting this whole innovation thing wrong.

Smart leaders know they need to change and innovate, but their efforts just don’t get traction. More ...

How do you find time for innovation in a busy world, when you hardly have enough time to meet your normal day-to-day goals, let alone think of innovation and change? Use the powerful “if/then thinking” process to make innovation a habit.

One of the most commonly-quoted stories around disruption is about Kodak, which was the market leader in film photography, but failed because it couldn’t adapt to digital photography. There are many variations of this story, giving various reasons More ...

Henry Ford was said to have quipped (although this is an urban legend), “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” More recently, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs echoed that sentiment when he said, More ...

Every business needs to innovate, but sometimes the best ideas come from an unexpected place: from outside your own industry. People from other fields think differently and don’t have the same unconscious biases that you do, so they might suggest More ...

I have TPD insurance with AIA. That’s no big deal, of course – thousands of Australians are insured with AIA. But an interesting feature of my AIA insurance is that I get a 10% discount on all my Qantas domestic flights. As a professional speaker More ...

What do these three things have in common?

1. Amazon Prime – Amazon’s $99/year membership service, with an estimated 80 million members
2. Gmail – Google’s free e-mail platform, with more than 1 billion active users
3. McCafe – McDonalds’ highly successful café offering

The answer: All three ideas came from employees, not from management.

In a fast-changing world, innovation is everybody’s business. The businesses that survive and thrive in this disruptive world are those More ...

Even if you believe it makes sense to tap into your team and customers for innovative ideas, you might not be convinced to look further afield. After all, your team members work actively in the business every day, and customers already know a More ...