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Your company’s name might not appear in this issue. But we at IBJ have failed if you peruse these pages without finding at least a few pearls of wisdom that will help you think differently about business. (Innovators embrace failure, right?)
Here are a few that stuck with me:
• “What would be your worst nightmare?” asks Don Brown, CEO and founder of Interactive Intelligence. “If there’s something that scares the bejeebers out you, then why don’t you do it first?”
• You must fight “organization constipation,” where ideas for new projects and ways to improve pile up amid the day-to-day quest to complete client work, says Jeb Banner, CEO and co-founder of SmallBox, the Web design, branding and marketing firm.
• Indianapolis was a bastion of innovation in the 1920s in no small part because it was a melting pot of foreigners and Americans who came here from other parts of the country, says James H. Madison, the noted Indiana University historian. “That kind of churning of people, that kind of churning and mixing that comes with it, is a good thing, in all kinds of ways, including for innovation,” he says.
This is IBJ’s first-ever Innovation Issue, part of our effort to evolve, perhaps even innovate, as the nature of the newspaper business changes.
As longtime readers know, our weekly print edition for decades was the go-to place for scoops on the important business stories of the day. We still break lots of stories in our weekly edition, but we’re now close to a 24/7 digital operation, with news posted as it happens.
In this digital age, competition for reader attention never has been fiercer—and the onus on news organizations to find new and surprising ways to engage readers never has been greater. Hence, this special issue and the planned publication of our second Interview Issue on Sept. 28.
I hope you will spend extra time with this issue. And please let us know what you liked and didn’t. We’ll be back to our regular format next week, but we’ll continue to pursue new ways to entertain and inform. Thanks for reading.
Check out the rest of IBJ's 2015 Innovation Issue.
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