There’s something oddly satisfying about skimming a stone across still water. You find one with just the right shape, judge the angle and let it go. Sometimes it sinks without trace. Mostly it skips once or twice. And occasionally it dances across the surface, leaving a trail of ripples behind. Right now, I’m about to throw two pebbles into the LinkedIn pond. Two different articles, boosted a few days apart, deliberately overlapping to see what happens when the ripples meet.

Have you ever created something for one reason, only to discover later that its real purpose was something else entirely? That appears to be what happened with Skiing Uphill. I wrote the book in twenty-seven days. Not because I had some lifelong ambition to become a business author, but because I had recently discovered that I actually enjoyed writing. Blogging was another matter. Definitely not in my DNA. Yet having started incub8ideas, I knew I needed to share some of the t

Winning £35,000 to develop an idea sounds like a fairly comfortable place to start. At the time, it certainly felt that way. BiKLOX had gone from an idea prompted by circumstance to an award-winning prototype with enough funding behind it to become real. Winning the national Hands Off My Bike competition set me on a path that saw me launch at a national exhibition just four months later. Over the next few years, though, the question changed. It was no longer whether I could l

I discovered Ideas Fest the day before it started. How did that happen? I work in innovation. I’m naturally curious. I spend a fair amount of time looking for interesting people, ideas, events and opportunities that might challenge my thinking. Yet somehow this one had completely passed me by. For a few minutes I seriously considered changing my plans, paying top price as penance for my lack of awareness and parachuting in for a day completely unprepared, but rather excited t

Don’t you find that some of your clearest thoughts emerge before you’ve consciously started thinking? You go to bed with something unresolved and wake up with the answer apparently waiting for you. Not every detail, but the essence of it. The complication has somehow fallen away and, for a few moments, the words are simply there, almost narrated in your head with startling clarity. Wouldn’t it be great to simply download that purity of thought in a single brain dump, before y

There are thousands of highly capable small businesses doing excellent work that very few people know about. That is one of the peculiar challenges of being an SME. You can be very good at what you do and still remain remarkably difficult to find. And when what you do is not particularly easy to explain in a sentence, visibility matters even more. Innovation consultancy is a good example. I help entrepreneurs and SMEs understand the real potential of an idea, turn it into a w