You Can’t Innovate If You Ignore Your Real Problems [FastCoDesign.com] – I wish more thought leaders in our fields would be as honest as Sohrab is here. It’s a nod-your-head-with-pained-recognition piece that acknowledges the limits of the aspirations that drive so many of these programs.

After a week of intense exploration and discussion, the executives thanked us heartily. They then went back to doing business precisely as they had before. This outcome is depressingly common, not just for Ziba but for any organization that seeks to build innovation capacity in businesses. The clients in this example are masters of efficient production, making incremental improvements to their product line every year as they steadily lose market share. But they expected a seminar to give them the sudden capability to innovate, without changing any other part of their business practice. It doesn’t work like that. An innovation consultancy cannot turn you into an innovative company.

Heello is Twitter for Pretending [Waxy] – Andy brilliantly reframes fakery as he inventories the startling range of misbehaving accounts flying the flag of established businesses, brands, or web personalities.

It’s easy to write off Heello as a Twitter clone. Created by the founder of Twitpic, the shameless knockoff looks and behaves like a stripped-down version of Twitter. But it’s shaping up to be more than that. Creative fakesters are using the blank slate to turn Heello into the parallel-universe version of Twitter. Heello is like a blank-slate Twitter with no moderation or verification. I doubt the Heello team wanted or expected this behavior, but they inadvertently created a perfect playground for parody and meta-commentary