Celebrate the Season… and Innovate

I love October. Tis the season of Nobel, MacArthur, and Booker awards — celebrations of true accomplishments not celebrity. And this is the time of early, glorious Fall weather in Washington, D.C. I didn’t even lose my cool at standing in line for over 95 minutes at various branches of the US Post Office without getting what I needed done done. This brand is toast.

Over the next few blogs I want to mull over the topic of innovation: particularly how to spot or anticipate the next innovation. Fundamentally, however, it’s a question of how we classify and sort things, and therefore how we can detect (perceive, classify, spot, much less anticipate) radical novelty.