Gregg Fraley

I don’t plug a lot of videos on this blog — how many video’s are all that relevant to creativity and innovation? This is the exception, I have one I’d really like you to watch, after you read this Jay Leno style “set up”. Growing up in anti-communist America the world was black and white. You were either pro-democracy capitalist, or a commmie pinko. There was no middle ground (gee, not so different than now). The “Domino Theory” had the USA fighting a communist insurgency in a tiny country in south east Asia that had no strategic value. The Vietnam war tore the country apart. I’d also rather forget the McCarthy era and blacklists. Which is what makes this new

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I’ve been reading Steve Faktor’s Econovation, The Red, White, and Bllue Pill for Arousing Innovation. It’s been out since November, but I’ve avoided it because Steve’s an economist and I have bad memories of nursing hangovers in my 8:00 am Economics class at University of Cincinnati. I wish I had picked it up sooner because it’s a fascinating, erudite, bitingly funny, well researched, and I think important book. Americans — Buy one now and send it to your Congressman. Tell him or her that if they don’t read it you’ll lash them with wet Chinese noodles at the door to their office. European readers, there’s plenty to learn from Faktor’s manifesto about how to reinvent an economy. As the title

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Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a creative and innovative endeavor. OWS has reinvented the concept of a protest. This post is a look at the creativity and innovation aspects of OWS, and not a political commentary. Public protest did need to be reinvented. As a brand, protests had lost shelf space — media attention. Protests of the last, say 30 years, have been decidedly ho-hum and almost completely ineffective. Between permits, gates, fences, and area exclusions, they were useless as means of democratic self-expression. The media hasn’t seen protests as news for years, but now that’s all changed. OWS is a big story and it will only get bigger until something — the conditions, government, authorities, laws, change. How did

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I’ve heard some rather direct and harsh criticism of President Obama’s recent comment about the USA being a “bit lazy” the last few decades. I’ll agree his comment is a bit unfair from one perspective: The USA has had nearly non-stop increases in productivity, and this for many years. Americans are working harder and doing more with less people, that’s true. And most workers are also doing it for less money. This squeeze is creating a tension that runs parallel to, and resonates with, the Occupy movement — but that’s another discussion. The fair part of Obama’s remark is that in the last 30 years the USA has watched it’s manufacturing base, and many of its competitive advantages, such as

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I just caught UK Labour party leader Ed Milliband’s speech at the Labour annual conference. In the talk he made a distinction between those who produce value and those who are simply predators. “Producers train, invest, sell…Predators are just interested in the fast buck, taking what they can out of the business.” In my view this is a crucial distinction and of utmost importance with regard to the world economy — and innovation. It’s not my role or my desire here to debate free market versus regulated markets. I’ll simply say that when it comes to innovation, it’s not really an innovation at all if it doesn’t provide actual value. Value means useful. Example: Is value created by mortgage derivatives?

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Elizabeth Warren made a very interesting comment at a recent campaign stop. The video and quotes from it are “going viral” — I’ve seen at least 4 re-postings on Facebook, and numerous tweets. Warren is seeking to be the new Senator in the State of Massachusetts. I wish her well, she’s a very intelligent woman with a heart. Her statement can be viewed on video here, but to sum up, she’s saying that wealthy people don’t do it alone. She says those who make a lot of money did it with the support of the society around them, including roads, educational systems (educated employees), police and fire protection. These are things that aid an entrepreneur to innovate and make money,

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I listen to the radio when I’m in Michigan. Thank goodness because I’ve got no cable here and my web connection is pokey. It’s sort of a self-imposed news blackout. Radio is my one solid connection, so, I had NPR in the background yesterday when I heard a show that had Everything to do with Innovation — This American Life. Ira Glass hosts this eclectic show, and as many times as I’ve heard it in the past, and enjoyed it, I’ve never really thought of him as even remotely concerned with business.  So all the more amazing when his program was an Innovation business mind-blower. Listen to it: it has to do with “Patent Trolls” and their huge negative impact

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A holistic approach to innovation is often missing in organizations that can’t create break-through new offerings, or innovate consistently. I’ve rapped about “holistic innovation” before, it’s one of my keynote talks. When audiences ask what I  mean, I explain the “4 P’s” of organizational creativity: People, Process, Product, and “Press” (code for internal culture or environment).  The 4 P’s concept was developed by Mel Rhodes many years ago. If an organization can gets its arms around the 4 P’s they’ve got a pretty good start on holistic innovation. But it’s only a start, there’s more. And many won’t like to hear it, but the additional things required to be more holistically innovative boil down to touchy-feely, artsy, trendy things. Things like

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If you’re a US citizen a political Tsunami is on its way to your shores. I could be wrong, but I predict here that the USA will have its own “hacking scandal.” The hacking scandal is currently happening in the UK, it’s the press run amok — snooping, lying, bribing, and corrupting everything in its path. To be fair, it’s not all the press/media — it’s mostly press owned by the Rupert Murdoch empire. For my British friends, this prediction might seem obvious. Every day that goes by there are new and ever-more-horrifying revelations about the violation of privacy rights of ordinary citizens (in addition to celebrities and government figures). Today’s headline informs us that Gordon Brown’s family was hacked,

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If you are interested in the big picture of global innovation, you might want to download this report from INSEAD — the 2011 Global Innovation Index. It ranks 125 countries by measuring various indicators, both inputs and outputs to the innovation process. INSEAD is essentially a global business school with points of presence all around the globe. INSEAD has a number of partners in putting together this information rich report, including: Alcatel-Lucent, Booz and Company, the Confederation of Indian Industry and the World Intellectual Property Organization (a specialized agency of the United Nations). Don’t confuse this ranking with size of economy, that’s not what’s being measured here. The “winner” Switzerland has a population of 7.6 million and an economy of 492

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