Check out 12 innovation articles from January 2025 that were the most read among our Inside Outside members. Sign up today at Inside Outside Innovation newsletter for our complete innovation reading list for innovation leaders.
12 Innovation Articles from January 2025
24 AI Tools Ranked from Essential to Forgettable for 2025 – Peter Yang
- “An honest review of which AI tools are actually worth your time.”
Why Tech Leaders Need to Be Renaissance People – Wildfire Labs
“Here’s where most advice goes wrong: It presents a false dichotomy between being a specialist or a generalist. The reality is more nuanced. Aim for the ideal balance of knowledge. Consider this:
- Too cold: Surface-level understanding that leaves you vulnerable to bad decisions.
- Too hot: Deep expertise creates tunnel vision.
- Just right: Enough knowledge to make informed decisions and spot problems early.”
Meet Daisy: The AI Granny Outsmarting Scammers – What’s Next is Everything
- Another great use of AI… “O2 has introduced “Daisy,” a lifelike AI-powered “granny,” to tackle phone scammers by engaging them in long, pointless conversations.“ Can’t wait for the AI generated scammers to get stuck in endless loops with the AI generated Grannies.
The Domain Expert Revolution: Why Industry Veterans Are Building Tomorrow’s Startups – Wildfire Labs
- “A decade ago, the typical startup founder had a CS degree from Stanford or MIT. Today, nurses build healthcare scheduling platforms, teachers launch education technology companies, and construction managers create project management tools – all without coding. What’s different about 2025 is that non-technical founders can build and are often better positioned to succeed than their technical counterparts.”
80/20 Rule for Solo-Founders – Tiny Empires
- “…stop everything you’re doing. Pull up your revenue numbers from the last three months. List every single thing that brought in money. Be specific. Now circle the top three. These are your needle movers. Everything else is noise.”
AI Will Change How You Innovate—Here’s What You Need to Know – Tristan Kromer
- “AI can improve ideation, validation, and support decision-making in the future. However, current implementations of AI within innovation teams can cause laziness and mediocrity. We are at risk of outsourcing our key differentiators as humans: creativity and empathy. If we let our mental muscles atrophy, our team and our AI models will overlook unconventional strategies that drive disruptive innovation. We will efficiently reinforce the status quo and stifle bold, forward-thinking decisions.”
25 Hard Questions Every Founder Should Ask Themselves – First Round
- “Startup founders share their go-to questions for taking a pulse check on everything from product strategy to co-founder relationships to their own decision making.”
The Future of Physical Retail – MIT Sloan
- “5 actions to elevate the customer experience. Shoppers are finding their way back to brick-and-mortar stores. Despite the higher growth rate of e-commerce sales, Forrester forecasts that physical retail will make up almost 80% of global retail sales in 2025. In North America, 83.8% of retail sales for the fourth quarter of 2024 are
projected to occur in physical stores, with the remaining 16.2% happening via e-commerce.”
Fundraising is Biased and Broken. It Also Works Pretty Well and Isn’t Going to Change – Charlie O’Donnell
- “Everything you’ve heard about fundraising—all the worst things about it—are largely true… Here’s the other truth: The venture fundraising process actually does a pretty good job of distributing capital to the founders with the best chance of creating big financial outcomes—at least at the onset.”
The Case for Selling Products that Adapt – HBR Podcast
- “Many companies make money by selling goods that need to be constantly replaced; think fast fashion, or tech devices that come out in new versions each year. But according to Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, smart organizations are increasingly eschewing that strategy for one focused on products that grow with the consumer through creative design or software updates.“
The Bootstrapped Revolution: How Small Teams Are Redefining Entrepreneurship – Barry O’Reilly
“Small teams and solopreneurs are thriving because of three key pillars:
- Access to Powerful Tools: Affordable and user-friendly platforms like Notion, Webflow, Zapier, and Stripe have democratized business creation, enabling founders to do more with less.
- Lower Overheads: Small teams operate leanly, focusing on profitability over growth at all costs. For example, tools like Webflow and Stripe have reduced average startup costs by 40%.
- Adaptability: Small teams can iterate faster and respond to market needs in real-time.”
Unleash 2025: A New Year of Thoughtflows, Creativity, and Augmented Intelligence – The Centaurian
- “Redefining Human-Machine Symbiosis – In this inaugural manifesto, I revisited Licklider’s 1960 prophecy that humans and computing machines would be “coupled together very tightly,” ushering in unprecedented forms of thinking. We explored how each major shift—from my first lines of code at age nine, to the dawn of smartphones—brought us closer to genuine cognitive partnership with technology.”
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