Tag Archives: cities

Where is the Innovation Bonfire the Hottest?

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire Sales

Now that I’ve secured a book deal with Palgrave Macmillan for my second book, I thought it might be interesting to peek in on the Nielsen Bookscan sales numbers on Amazon and look back at the last couple of years of sales by geography in the United States for Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. This is what you’ll see in the map above (darker color indicating more dense sales). Unfortunately they don’t collect international data an so I can’t show you a world map, despite the book’s global popularity.

So where in the United States does the innovation bonfire burn the brightest? Here are the top ten cities:

  1. Washington D.C.
  2. Boston
  3. Los Angeles
  4. New York
  5. Philadelphia
  6. Silicon Valley
  7. Seattle
  8. Cincinnati
  9. Chicago
  10. Dallas

Think your city should be on the list?

Get a copy of the book or ask your library to acquire it.

Curious what my second book is about?

My intention is to make it the definitive instruction manual for planning successful change (complete with guest experts and numerous collaborators).

I’m currently developing the powerful visual, collaborative change planning toolkit that will sit at its core and building the web site that will allow me to start inviting people to register their interest in getting exclusive early access to the toolkit before the rest of the world, so people can use it with their clients or in their company as soon as possible, and also possibly contribute to its evolution.

So, stay tuned and subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get the latest info on this exciting new project!


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Making People Dance Instead of Jaywalk

Making People Dance Instead of JaywalkI love anything that is fun and investigates human psychology, especially crowd psychology, and the investigation of how you can use fun to potentially influence human behavior for social good (i.e. the piano stairs example I’ve shared before).

Nobody likes to wait at pedestrian crossings. Traffic lights can be dangerous for impatient pedestrians trying to save a few seconds to cross the street (and willing to risk their lives in the process).

The folks at Smart created The Dancing Traffic Light, an experiential marketing concept providing a fun and safe way to keep people from venturing too early into the street. They started by placing a dance room on a square in Lisbon, Portugal and invited random pedestrians to go into the box and dance. Their movements were then displayed on a few traffic lights in real time. This resulted in 81% more people stopping and waiting at those red lights.

It’s a genius marketing gimmick because it reinforces the brand value of fun by making people dance in a box that looks, imagine that, a bit like a smart car.

The question brought up by this example of a marketing campaign that claims that fun can be used to achieve social good, is that it claims a benefit, that without an extended test could be attributed to novelty…

Does the benefit hold up over time?

Or does it stop being fun and impactful after people have seen it once or twice or the live video component goes away and it becomes a recording? Do people then start jaywalking again at the normal rate?

What do you think?


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The Battle for Innovation Attention

The competition among countries around the world for attention for their innovation efforts, and to find corporate buyers for the intellectual property being developed in their universities, is heating up.

This week I came across the following sizzle reel from New Zealand’s KiwiNet, otherwise known as The Kiwi Innovation Network:

This is just a taste of what is coming…

A heated BATTLE is brewing among not just countries or regions, but cities too, as they all ratchet up their competition for public/private partnerships, publicity for existing local innovators, and to attract additional innovative people and businesses to their city, region, or country.

People are writing about Chicago struggling and Seattle surging for example.

One look at the Top 5 cities in the Seattle article link and you’ll quickly see the link.

What is your city, region or country doing to attract innovation talent?


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