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It was hard to ignore the results of the IBM CEO study that arrived last week. As one of my colleagues noted, "Wow. This looks just like something we could have written." 

Indeed, top-level headlines describing how change is accelerating, how leaders need to become better at reinventing their businesses, and the critical importance of customer focus, echo critical themes explored by me and my colleagues in recent years.

It's good to see growing alignment about the need to confront the "new normal" of constant change. Yet, while I agree with many of the report's broad findings, something nagged me as I thought about it over the weekend. I finally put my finger on it as I touched down in Manila on Monday night: I worry that leaders seeking to meet the challenges spelled out in IBM's report will completely miss the mark.

That concern is most acute when it comes to the report's first section, which described how CEOs were looking for more creative leaders. As IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano noted in the report's introduction, respondents viewed creativity as the "single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity."

The report suggests that creative leaders should "embrace ambiguity," "take risks that disrupt legacy business models," and "leapfrog beyond tried-and-true management styles."

Executives certainly feel the need for this kind of creativity. IBM's survey provides one clear example. My own experience suggests that executives often lament how their organization "isn't good at developing good ideas" or "isn't as creative as it should be." One leader put it bluntly: "Can't you just get my people to be more innovative? If not, can you help me find some new people?"

What's behind questions like this is an implicit assumption that creativity is a human capital problem. If this assumption is right, the answer is coaching, cajoling, or — in an extreme case  — replacement. 

But having spent a lot of time inside a lot of companies, I believe that human capital isn't the problem.

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

 During my week of conferences a couple of weeks ago, I attended one day of the two-day BIF-5 conference put on by the Business Innovation Factory in Providence. BIF conferences are much like the famed TED conference – each presenter or “storyteller” gets 15 minutes to tell their story, and they are encouraged to tell a story rather than simply making a presentation.

Reviewing my notes and others’ notes (from blogs and Twitter) from this conference, I see that a theme from this conference might be “fostering serendipity.” I talked to a couple of people about this at the conference and via Twitter, where one exchange with a fellow conference attendee went like this:

If we're treating innovation as a discipline, where does "fostering serendipity" fit in?

A way to foster serendipity is to avoid coming to closure. Leave options open for serendipity to happen.

The theme played itself out through a number of the second-day BIF5 talks Science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, described neurobiological research that proves that the mind needs to be quiet and in a state of relaxation to produce insights. In a crisis, he said, “your fear won't save you. You should learn to relax and hear quiet voice of creativity in face of fear.” His research has shown that insights come from the right hemisphere, and you can drown them out by too much focused, by the very attention you pay to the analytical act of problem solving.

Bill Buxton, principal scientist for Microsoft Research, said that creativity and invention are always context-critical and therefore social. We must be able to observe what’s going on around us to be able to create insights. He makes note not just of new ideas he gets, but of the circumstances in which he got them, so he can more easily replicate them. He also said that an applied approach to research rather than a curiosity-driven approach actually reduces productivity. Another reason why curiosity rules, he said, is that innovation doesn’t have a long tail, but rather a long nose. “Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old,” he said. The first prototype of a computer mouse appeared in the early 1960s. Success at innovation will be had by those who are able to spot good ideas and develop and nurture them.

Fast Company founder Alan Webber, now author of Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself, suggested that serendipity can be fostered by paying attention. Keep two lists, he said, one of the things that get you up in the morning, and one with the things that keep you up at night. Pay attention to these things and pay attention to people as well. The key to “making things happen and creating value is to pay attention to other people. There are teachers – and, presumably – lessons everywhere.

Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger talked of the need for all of us to become more “intellectually ambidextrous” and proficient at the moving from “knowing” to “doing” – the hallmark of the entrepreneur “What if we took seriously the notion that we're all entrepreneurs?” he asked. He didn’t mean we are all going to go out and start businesses, but rather we are all in control of our ideas and what we choose to do with them, how and whether we choose to develop them and act on them. He talked about co-creation, which often requires a bit of serendipity to pull off. His very career – moving back and forth between academics and business – if not his talk at BIF5, was a testament to taking ideas from one context and seeing how well they might work and how they change when you apply them in a different context. That’s a lesson in serendipity as well – can you create the conditions of possibility for serendipity to happen by consciously looking at things from different angles?

One of the things we at Innosight often tell clients is that in order to innovate it’s important to question assumptions. Once you start questioning assumptions, that fosters serendipity as well. Former George Washington University president Stephen Trachtenberg discussed that very thing when he talked about innovating the university calendar. Why the agrarian model of summer off? Why four years, or three years for law school? If you start questioning those assumptions, what new ideas can you uncover about how to innovate the university?

I’ve only focused on a few of the talks from a very full day at BIF-5 here. Many of the talks were also about innovating to change the world for good. All in all, BIF conferences provide a very inspiring experience that you can share as well – like TED, all the talks are captured on video and will be posted on the BIF Innovation Story Studio site in the weeks to come.

• Reversing Assumptions Can Often Lead to Innovation by David Mork | Examiner

  While a bit simplistic, the article makes a great point that reversing assumptions about your business is often the best way to uncover possibilities for new growth. However, benefits are not just limited to reversals -- all questioning and examination of assumptions is likely to lead to new ideas.

• Why Solving Other People's Problems Is Easy by Mark McGuinness | Lateral Action blog

  Article discusses the phenomenon of psychological distance in solving problems: "even minimal cues of psychological distance can make us more creative." Researchers discovered that subjects found it easier to solve problems when they were told that the questions had been devised by an institute 2,000 miles away as opposed to 2 miles away."

• Patent Auctions Offer Protections to Inventors by Steve Lohr | NYTimes.com

  "A flurry of new companies and investment groups has sprung up to buy, sell, broker, license, and auction patents...The arrival of these new business-minded players, according to patent experts and economists, could lead to a robust marketplace for patents, where value is determined not so much by court judgments but by buyers and sellers, perhaps, someday, like eBay."

• Amazon Is Selling Designs of Its Own by Geoffrey A. Fowler | WSJ.com

  "For the first time ever, Amazon's second-quarter North American sales of 'general merchandise' -- which includes everything from patio furniture to TVs -- were larger than its sales of media, such as books, movies and videogames." The author attributes much of this growth to growth in Amazon's private-label business.

"College and high school have long been the Petri dishes of football innovation," wrote Charles Seibert last week in the Wall Street Journal. I made note of this last December in this post about the innovative nature of the spread offense in college football.  Innovation in football is a classic case of constraint-driven innovation. Colleges have smaller budgets than pros and make less money, so there's less to lose and more to gain from doing something radical. High schools have even fewer financial resources and even less to lose.

Besides financial resources, there are two main constraints driving innovation in football.  One is talent. High school coaches have the least amount of choice over their players. They don't draft players as the pros do, and they don't generally recruit as colleges do. The play with who they have. And many of the wackiest and most creative offensive schemes in football are designed to level the playing field, so to speak, to make a team that has fewer talented players competitive with teams that do.

The second major constraint driving football innovation is the set of rules that governs the game. If you can come up with something that exploits a loophole, it has the added advantage of initial surprise, until other teams begin to adjust for it. Over the off-season I came across a mention of the A-11 offense being practiced since 2007 in some California high schools. A-11 exploits a couple of loopholes: in scrimmage-kick formation, every player on the offense is eligible to catch the ball. And if you have no offensive players wearing numbers 50 to 79, there can be no ineligible receivers on the offense. After last season, in an effort to take some of the sting out of the A-11, the National Federation of State High School Associations added a rule mandating at least four players on the line of scrimmage wearing numbers 50 to 79.

But the A-11's creators simply tweaked the offense, noted the Oakland Tribune last week: "True innovators don't concede to roadblocks. Not surprisingly, they're still going around, through and over them at Piedmont, executing wacky double-reverse flea-flickers with two quarterbacks in the backfield, three men up front and six players split wide." The A-11's creators suit up those "ineligible" receivers, but just push right out to the edge of what they are elegible to do: they can still carry the ball, throw it, catch screens, and block. They just can't go downfield to catch passes.

In other words, these players can still mess with the minds of the defense, which was a big part of the original point of the A-11 and part of the point of all innovations that push at rules. Noted the Washington Post, "Throughout football's history, offensive innovation has been based on misdirection and deception, from Knute Rockne's box shift at Notre Dame in the 1920s to the spread option of today. But [the A-11] spurred a debate about the sport's tradition and rules of play."

The other main point of A-11 is to add randomness to the offense that results in many more scoring opportunities, as Scientific American pointed out: "In a standard formation with five fixed linemen, a play can unfold with 36 different scenarios for who receives the snap and who ends up with the ball — including a quarterback sneak. In the A-11 offense, because the receivers and linemen (and even quarterbacks) are interchangeable, the number of different possibilities for what can happen on a given play skyrockets to 16,632."

Innovation in the offense hasn't completely sidestepped the pros. Seibert's article discusses the rise of the Wildcat offense in pro football, noting that "Even the biggest and most heavily favored juggernauts can on any given day be suddenly undone by a group of scrappy upstarts with a wealth of passion and a well-wrought stratagem: some riotous, rhythm-ruining array of timely defensive blitzing packages, or a stunningly inventive attack formation such as the new Wildcat offense."

Image from Chicago Sun-Times Sports Pros(e) blog

• Hey, AP: Here Are 7 Money Making Ideas for You, by Erik Sherman | BNET Technology Blog

  Is the Associated Press doomed in an Internet age? Some have suggested this, and their increasingly protectionist stance seems to indicate they think so too. Business blogger Erik Sherman disagrees, offering seven ways AP can make money on the Internet.

• Stressed Brains Rely on Habit, by Jeff Akst | The Scientist

  "Rats that had been stressed repeatedly and unpredictably for three weeks were more likely than unstressed animals to continue performing habitual behaviors, even when it no longer made sense to do so." These findings have implications for innovation, since innovation requires an ability to break free of pre-existing patterns.

• Too Much Networking? by Alan Boyle | Cosmic Log Blog on msnbc.com

  "An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold" says the journal Science, citing that as a reason why most open-source software shows only incremental improvements from version to version. The article stops short of blaming the Internet and social networking for groupthink, probably because the Internet also fosters the kinds of weak ties that lead to breakthrough thinking.

• Vendor Sparks Art Concepts by Sarah Junek | The Southlake Journal

  A hand-restored cigarette machine rescued from the scrap metal pile after legislation banished them in 1997 now vends cigarette-pack-size art in a Keller, Texas, art gallery for an accessible price of $5.

• Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas, Allison Arieff, NYTimes.com

  Whimsical, absurd, multi-functional idea mashups by artist Steven M. Johnson who describes his work as “Mix-’N-Match, outrageous extrapolation, speeded-up thinking, random/lateral thinking (which comes close to the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep where some claim inspired inventions and scientific inventions come through), and so forth.”

• How to build a bigger brain, Mark Wheeler, UCLA Newsroom

  Meditation could be the way to safely grow your brain, according to a study by UCLA researchers.

• An Invention That Could Change the Internet For Ever, Andrew Johnson, The Independent

  Background on the WolframAlpha "knowledge engine, scheduled to launch tonight (8 EDT). This software will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before. Google is reportedly working on a competitor.

This post is the last stop on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for the book The Designful Company by Martin Neumier, who is also author of The Brand Gap and Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. I'm glad I had the opportunity to read this book and talk with the author, because I have to admit to some skepticism about the entire design-thinking movement and the effort to make all innovation be about design. However, after reading this book and engaging in the following email dialogue with Marty Neumier, I now understand more about the entire point of design thinking than I did before. It all hinges on how you are defining design and how much latitude can be given to using that broader description to drive corporate innovation.

Here's the interview:

R: Clearly when you talk about “design” as a way of apprehending and seeing the world, you are not talking about the design of room décor. For those not already on the “design thinking” bandwagon (and not already designers), what is the working definition of “design” that makes it appropriate as a system and not an action?


M: In my view, design can be a system, an action, or the outcome of an action. For example, I work in design (the system of thought), I design things (the action), and the results are various designs (the deliverables). I especially like Herbert Simon's definition of a designer. Simon was a Nobel-winning social scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence. He said: "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

My purpose in writing The Designful Company was to show that the discipline and the activity of design can be applied to more than "posters and toasters," or communications and products. It can also be applied to higher order challenges such as brand-building, decision-making, organizational structure, and management models.

R: You say that you can apply the principles of aesthetics to strategy and organizational change. How can aesthetics work for these things in a prescriptive way, rather than a descriptive — i.e., how can aesthetics be used to drive and guide strategy and organizational change, as opposed to being used to looking backward at those things and assign aesthetic principles to the results after the fact?

M: Nice observation. We normally "ascribe" aesthetic qualities to things we already believe are beautiful, don't we? But that's because most of us don't think like designers. We think like audiences who have little control over our experiences, except the control that comes from choosing. We've become a culture of shoppers. We expect to choose our solutions off the "solutions rack," instead of creating new solutions that weren't there before. When you start "designing" solutions, you bring along the need for aesthetics — concepts like contrast, rhythm, pattern, scale, simplicity, and efficiency — to inform your solutions, instead of noticing them after the fact. You become a maker instead of an audience member.

R: I'm particularly interested in the concepts of simplicity and efficiency. How can these be used to drive innovation at the organizational level?

M: It's easy to be innovative once. Most great businesses are founded on one great innovation. It's much harder to be innovative time and time again. To do that, you need a culture of innovation.

But what happens is that companies start building on their first successful innovation by adding more complexity — extra processes, controls, brand extensions, and so on — to bolster and commercialize what's working. This added complexity makes it more difficult to recreate the conditions that gave rise to the original innovation.

So what they need to do is to break down the silos, the complexity, and the rigid thinking so that they reclaim the simplicity that first allowed them to innovate. They need to become "designful" again.

R: There’s an ongoing debate as to whether a company culture must be innovative in order for the company to be innovative, or whether putting one innovation foot ahead of the other and pushing forward anyway can lead a company to develop an innovation culture. You seem to be in the first group here. Please talk about why you feel it’s important for a company to develop an innovation culture *before* trying to innovate, and talk about how they might go about doing that.

M: I'm actually in the second group. Realistically, a company can't wait until its culture has been fully transformed before starting to innovate. In my book I outline 16 "levers of change" that can be used separately or in concert to move the organization from a spreadsheet-driven company to a design-driven company. Of course, the further along the transformation curve, the easier it is to innovate.

R: I sense a tension in your book between asserting that everyone can be trained in design thinking and that you need real designers to be able to innovate. Are you saying that there’s a class of people who are designers and therefore able to do this, and another set of people who don’t have this talent and therefore are doomed to always need a designer to turn to for creative thinking?

M: No. I've found that most people are already design thinkers — they're just unaware of it. If designing is about changing an existing situation into a preferred one, then we're all designers. The only question is whether we can martial the principles and processes of design to apply them deliberately and effectively.

People don't easily acquire new skills, much less a new way of thinking. So the best way for a company to jumpstart a culture of innovation — at least in my experience — is to build a strong internal brand department that can work across silos to influence the rest of the company. The process starts with hiring the right people.

R: How would you go about training non-designers to think more like designers?

M: I'd use a "branded training program." I'd start a company-wide educational program that teaches rarefied skills in the areas of innovation, collaboration, communication, brand strategy, and brand behavior. I say "branded training" because the skills shouldn't generic — they should be aligned with the unique purpose and strategy of the business. The fact is, company can't out-innovate the competition unless it can first out-learn it.

My view is that anyone can think more like a designer by simply making it a priority. Like the zen master says, when the student is ready, the teacher appears

Here are links to the previous reviews, interviews, and podcasts on the tour: 

• Monday, April 20: Brand Autopsy
• Tuesday, April 21: The Marketing Fresh Peel
• Wednesday, April 22: Idea Sandbox
• Thursday, April 23: Principled Innovation
  

• Yes, I'm A CEO Who Really Uses Twitter - Forbes.com

  Communispace CEO Diane Hessan discusses why she's found Twitter compelling: "Twitter has brought me new ideas and new friends, and it has connected us to a world of people who are trying to be adventurous and innovative."

• How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter) - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org

  Haque points out that Twitter is a great way for a newspaper to build four resources and capabilities that will save them: viral distribution, context, relational capital, and business model experimentation. And — "conversely, if Google snaps up Twitter instead, it likely really will be the end of newspapers as we know them."

• The Challenge of Recipes on Twitter - NYTimes.com

  The strict 140-character limit on Twitter posts is predictably enough inspiring creativity, including from Marueen Evans, whose tweets are entire recipes that work, once decoded. According to this article, Evans' tweets are "awesome acts of compression. Ingredients, actions, quantities, times and temperatures — both Fahrenheit and Celsius — boiled down to utmost richness, density and clarity. A dish, a meal, a trip to deliciousness magically packed into the tiniest carry-on bag."

• Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis — HBS Working Knowledge

  MIels Davis as inspiration for business innovation: "Davis' ability to nurture talent is legendary...and...the process that led to Kind of Blue is an example of pushing boundaries and taking experimentation right up to the edge of failure in the pursuit of something new; Davis pushed his musicians 'to the edge,' but he did it in a way that effectively managed the risks. This might be something we can learn from in business as well."

• Understanding Dolly Parton, Broadway's Newest Composer -- New York Magazine

  Worth reading for the description of Parton's leap into Broadway, for which she has composed the music for a stage version of 9 to 5, and also for a description of her process for singing harmony: "She keeps trying variations on her riffs, which she calls 'my little curls' — an astonishing armamentarium of baroquely detailed turns, runs, melismas, appoggiaturas...not so much performed as shed. You’d think you could pick them out of the carpet when she was done."

Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Great Ideas Rolling (In An Uphill World) by Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff (Morgan James, 2008)

The ability to create ideas is, curiously enough, both underrated and overrated. Underrated because we all get ideas, and we have probably all heard the famous Linus Pauling quote (paraphrased): "the way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.“ Overrated because it’s possible that we wouldn’t need so many ideas if we just knew how to nurture and build on the ones we have. Awake at the Wheel offers a forgettable, parable-based approach to ideation, but between the techniques – and there are true gems in that regard – runs a golden thread of information on how to care for and feed ideas:

“No matter our preferred approach [to ideation]…the challenge remains the same for all of us: how to honor, develop, and manifest our own ideas. … Our ideas are diminished, not because they are worthless, but because we do not know how to elicit their value. … Afraid we will be judged, or worse, fail, we discard them long before their time.”

As I said, I found the parable portion, set in the Stone Age, not terribly edifying. However, the book offers an extremely useful toolbox, which presents ideation and idea-building techniques in five categories – attend; intend; suspend; extend; connect. The idea of putting the ideas into categories is in and of itself instructive, offering information on how and when to use the techniques.

My favorite technique was “Happy Accident.” We’ve all heard about breakthroughs that were made while the inventor was trying to accomplish something else. Viagra, after all, was originally a heart medication. It didn’t work for its intended purpose, and yet the researchers had trouble getting the participants in the clinical trial to return the samples.

But how to consciously make such an “accidental” breakthrough? According to the Happy Accident technique – “The next time anything goes wrong with a project of yours, stop and see if the mistake offers any clues about new ways of proceeding.”

Similarly, the technique “Lead to Gold” offers a blueprint for changing bad ideas to good ideas: “Conjure up a really bad idea in response to the challenge [you are working on]. Write down anything good about this bad idea – any essence that is redeemable in some way. Using this redeemable essence as a trigger, generate at least three ideas you can do something about.”

If you’re feeling particularly creative or already have your own techniques for originating, developing, and manifesting new ideas, you can enter the Awake at the Wheel Tools and Techniques contest. If your technique is used in the book’s sequel, you could win $100. If it’s voted the best by readers, you could win $1,000. Now that sounds like a good idea to me! 

Last year on my previous blog IdeaFlow, I reviewed Jack’s Notebook by Gregg Fraley, a book with the intriguing subtitle “A Business Novel about Creative Problem Solving.” This week I had the opportunity to revisit the book, and Gregg, as part of the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour.

While telling the story of Jack Huber’s rise from under-employment to starting his own business, Jack’s Notebook takes the reader though the steps of the powerful yet sometimes elusive Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS), a meta-model for thinking and problem-solving that’s been around for about 50 years. CPS training is most commonly taught at the CPSI conferences put on by the Creative Education Foundation [note: I learned the process at CPSI five years ago; my IdeaFlow posts on various CPSI conferences are here].

Herewith, my conversation with Gregg about Jack's Notebook and creativity in corporations:

Q. It’s been 15 months since we last talked about Jack’s Notebook. What has the response been, especially from business readers?

A. As far as sales go, it’s been fair and remains steady. As far as what people say, it’s been great. There haven’t really been any bad reviews. As far as business goes, I had one Fortune 100 client who bought a copy for everyone in her department. I heard later on that one person had an epiphany as a result.

Q. Why do you think that was?

A. Creative thinking offers transformational possibility, both personally and for a business. My mantra is that creative processes and sophisticated methodologies are wonderful things, but creativity itself is where the rubber meets the road in day to day behavior. You could be an expert in TRIZ and still not be thinking creatively on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve got another story, about an engineer working on his PhD degree. He emailed me that he had started carrying around a notebook in which he did daily brainstorming and then convergence [note: the main two steps of the CPS process are divergence and convergence]. He told me it had changed his life, and he said that that daily work had helped him start his own business.

Q. When you do hear criticisms from business readers, what do they say?

A. One of the criticisms has been that this is not a classic business book. I actually agree with that. It wasn’t written that way. It’s not directly related to a specific corporate challenge, but more a fundamental business skill — creativity. And that skill will bubble up if you practice.

Q. Speaking of skills, when you work through CPS with corporate clients, what’s the place where they generally have the most trouble?

A. Definitely, in reframing challenges. Most people are resistant to reframing because they think they know what the problem is. Sophisticated business managers can be stumped by the tools and techniques that allow team to see things from a different perspective. And how you frame a problem has everything to do with how you solve it. Setting up “guardrails” can get people thinking the wrong way.

Q. In my experience it’s important to use something like guardrails to frame a problem in order to come up with the most creative solution within the constraints of the business objectives.

A. It depends on whether you are working on new product that’s simply a line extension, or on a breakthrough. For example, I worked with a company that was trying to come up with a new dessert, and all the ideas were simply variations on existing desserts. It wasn’t until we reframed the problem as “In what ways might I own the after-dinner occasion?” that we started coming up with breakthrough ideas.

Q. Oh — that would be a framing that’s similar to our JOBS lenses, where we work to understand what job the customer is actually trying to do, and frame the challenge in that way.

A. Right.

Q. So, how creative do you think business people have to be in order to come up with breakthroughs?

A. The right person can be incredibly meaningful. Look at Steve Jobs. Look at Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod and the iPhone. When you look at the iPhone and compare it to what Sony, Motorola, etc., have come up with, it just looks so much better — and that’s one guy. The average Joe Blow isn’t going to do that.

However, that doesn’t mean that the average corporate manager, if they stick to a process, can’t deliver meaningful incremental innovation. And I believe average people can do amazing things, with the right motivation and a good process. And passion means a lot. If you combine passion and motivation with a process, breakthroughs are definitely possible for anyone.

Q. Jack isn’t motivated or passionate at the beginning of Jack’s Notebook.

A. That’s right — he’s actually depressed. People get flat because of lack of hope. What motivates him is hope. And hope comes from thinking in a little different way. It goes back to reframing. If you ask the brain a question, it wants to give you an answer. If you give it an open-ended statement — such as, “in what ways might I _______”  — the brain will reconfigure it a million ways.

Recognizing you’re in a hopeless mess is often where problem-solving begins. Another common first step is recognition of fear and facing of fear. Sometimes rules have been around corporations so long, no one's left who knows why they exist — they’ve been around for years. And as a result, people get into traps and beliefs that could be changed, except for their fear of challenging the rules.

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One of the benefits to being scheduled toward the end of the book-tour week is that I can link to previous stops on the tour. The other virtual-tour-stop blogs have had varying focuses, so if you’re interested in Jack's Notebook you might want to see what’s been written about it from other perspectives:

• The Naked Idea (charities and nonprofits)
• Education Innovation (education)
• Marketing Fresh Peel (branding)