Project management in tweets ...

• All business activities are in transition from innovation (rare and poorly understood) to commodity-like (common and well defined).


• The characteristics of an activity vary during its lifecycle. An innovation is dynamic & requires deviation whilst a commodity does not.


• How to manage an activity varies with the stage of its lifecycle. Which is why no single project methodology is suitable everywhere.


• Successful project management is knowing when to use static (six sigma, prince 2) and when to use dynamic methodologies (XP, Scrum).

Innovation Management in tweets ...

• Many people mix up the terms invention, idea and innovation.


• Innovation is the first(ish) attempt to put an idea into practice. You can manage the process of implementation.


• Ideas are postulated entities and concepts derived from invention and discovery. You can create an environment to encourage ideas.


• You can encourage and manage some aspects of innovation but the real trick is finding out which idea is going to be valuable.


• There is an inverse relationship between the future value of an activity and how certain we are about this.


• We don't know which ideas will be successful - we have to take a guess and often we will fail in our guesses.


• Innovation management is a mix of management, encouragement, guess work and embracing failure.