The Lessons of Innovation from Fast Company

Every company is looking to be innovative -- and every business magazine offers insights about innovation.

A recent Fast Company offered lessons of innovations, and made some worthwhile points. I've identified a few important lessons (below) but check out the entire article:

• Growth should be a tactic, not a strategy. In other words, growth shouldn't be the end goal by itself, but a means to achieve a more significant, sustainable goal.
•  Design is a competitive advantage. Not enough companies look at design this way -- but more should.
•  Social media makes products and services better. This is a way to look at social media that B2B companies often don't understand.

Check out the other lessons, too, here.

The Need to Expand Beyond Traditional Channels

The current Fast Company's special design theme offers up some interesting articles. Its article about the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum ("Mister Moggridge Has Mad Ambition") raises some interesting questions about the broad field of design.

What I also find interesting was a quote about the nature of museums, from Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art, and culture -- and someone who understands how museums work:

"Museums originally were founded as 19th-century institutions. Well, now we exist in a different kind of world. A hundred-thousand people came to an exhibit? Well, a hundred-thousand people watching a TV program is very little. A hundred-thousand people watching a YouTube video is puny! And so I think the idea is, How do we take the stuff of the museum, the visceral experience of the object, and somehow translate that to other forms of media? We haven't figured that out yet."

That's a challenge all communications functions need to solve in their own way: how to take an organization's traditional content and push it out to make it more accessible by the people who can't visit your corporate equivalent of a museum gallery.