The US Coast Guard and Rapid Adaptation: “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Textbook Hurricane’ or a ‘Standard Oil Spill'”
From recognizing innovators, to empowering your team at every level, to developing innovation outposts, the US Coast Guard are experts in innovation and idea management. Learn more in this podcast interview.
The Top Practices That Separate Great Leaders From The Rest
How do great leaders separate themselves from the rest? This article will examine how several excellent leaders, including Rich Teerlink and Steve Jobs, were able to inspire their teams, develop incredible products, and transform their companies.
The Essential Skills to Teach Intrapreneurs
At JR Simplot, a new cross-functional innovation initiative recently formed looking for ideas that would help optimize company efficiency, improve training programs, and more. And when they built this team, they realized that a big part of launching an innovation initiative was education. Learn more in this podcast.
Critical Steps to Validate Your Startup’s Business Model
A business plan is at the heart of every business. But instead of just writing down your business plan, your startup’s business model will require proper validation before you start doing business. If you don’t validate it, the investor simply won’t invest. You can validate your business model through three core assumptions: delivering, creating and capturing value.
Ways to Exercise Your Creative Muscles
Feeling like you’re stuck in a creative rut? Creativity works a lot like a muscle—you have to exercise it for it to work properly. Once you get stuck in a cycle of routine, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost your creativity. Maybe you’re not contributing innovative ideas during team meetings anymore, or maybe you just feel like you’re doing the same thing every single day. Whatever is making you feel uncreative, you don’t have to live with it. All it means is that it’s time to exercise your creative muscles more than you have been! Here are some ways you can stay sharp, innovative, and creative.
Charisma is Important for a Leader, But There are Other Qualities to Consider
It is important for any group or organization to have one or more strong leaders. To be a leader, it is critical that an individual has charisma as it will increase the odds that others will follow their words and believe in their ideas. However, charisma is not the only thing that an individual needs to be a good leader. What are some other qualities that are just as important?
Florence: Lessons from a Global Innovation Hub
While discussing innovative cities, one can’t help but think about those that were major catalysts for change in the past: Athens, Istanbul, Hong Kong, and Florence, for example. But how do they compare to more modern innovation hubs such as Silicon Valley, London, or Singapore? In this article, we’ll look at Florence - and 10 recognizable and applicable elements that contributed to its success throughout the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. We’ll also look at how Florence spurs innovation today.
Transferring Innovation Skills to Newbies: Fact or Fiction?
Expert innovators know from experience how to innovate while minimizing hassle, needless tasks and wasted effort – they’ve been successful (and unsuccessful) countless times through trial and error. Using flight simulators and surgical learning tools as examples, it’s been proven that teaching veteran skills to ‘newbies’ isn’t science-fiction, especially in more ‘exact’ disciplines such as medicine and math. But is it possible to design a crash-course that teaches young and inexperienced innovators the less-definable skills, attitudes and insights necessary to ideate, champion and implement without having to go through all the awkwardness of being a rookie? We think so, and here’s why.
Making Innovation More of a Science And Less of an Art
One of the greatest challenges facing innovation professionals is to find the right approach to a given innovation problem. Whether that’s instilling the innovation mojo in a large corporation or simply helping teams become more innovative, the ways to do this seem to be more of an art than a science. However, during the last ten years there has been a strong push to turn this art form into more of a science.
15 Innovative Meeting Formats that Boost Creativity and Strengthen Engagement
How to organise a meeting in such a way that they result in creativity and energy? How to ensure that people are actively participating instead of being only passively attending meetings?
5 Counterintuitive Management and Innovation Tips From Rising Leaders
Business these days might as well require us to be tactical geniuses because it’s like navigating a field of landmines. One wrong step can completely blow you out of the water. The risks obviously aren't keeping everyone at bay, as new leaders are rising to face the challenges during these fast-paced, turbulent times. To help them on this quest, great leaders and managers of today share their most valuable management and innovation tips.
What are the Key Innovation Challenges?
Innovation has become a business mantra and a word that threatens to lose all meaning every time it’s uttered at another conference or thrown into another book title. But in spite of its omnipresence it continues to be essential – a growing field – and one of the only practices that might save businesses from extinction.
Creativity is not Enough: How to Turn Ideas into Revenue
“Eureka!’, Archimedes famously howled, while running butt naked through the streets of Syracuse. Soaking in his bath tub, the bearded Greek inventor had just discovered a new method of determining an object’s volume. Funnily enough, this well-known story captures two myths about innovation. One: it’s the work of a sole – and usually slightly eccentric – inventor. Two: chance has a part to play. For businesses, the reality is vastly different. Indeed, turning ideas into revenue requires quite a bit more than just ideation and luck.
Opening the Floodgates of Innovation: Insights from Deloitte Innovation Day
Take a quick glance around your office. What do you see? Categorically “Start-up” types in t-shirts and jeans passing bottles of craft beer around? Or “Suits”, with their collars starched to perfection, hunched over their laptops and scrambling away at emails? What would happen if we flipped these scenarios around? I for one, would love to see my accountant rock up to work in a Hawaiian Shirt; a calculator in one hand, and a piña colada in the other. But what difference would this make?
The (Non)Sense of Employee-Focused Innovation Training
A lot has been written about Innovation Training in the recent past. At Culturevate, we clearly see the sense of such training, but there are some important conditions that needs to be met for these efforts to generate long-term impact for an organization. Not all companies understand these conditions, which often leads to mediocre results and missed opportunities. One extra difficulty is that a good Innovation Training should be driven by and aligned with several functional parts of a large corporate organization.
12 Tips for New Business Owners in the First 12 Months of Their Company’s Life
If you are starting a new business you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of decisions you need to make. You may wonder what secret tricks successful business owners used to ensure that their companies grew in the right direction. Here are twelve tips that you should use in your first twelve months in order to make sure that your company has the best chance to succeed.
Leadership Tips for Startup Entrepreneurs
An entrepreneur does not run a business with his or her acute business acumen alone: it comes with leadership skills. Here are some tips for a startup entrepreneur.
10 Ways to Reduce the Innovation Failure Rate
You are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment, but most of the time innovation fails. Innovation process-expert Robert Cooper shows that of every seven new product/service projects, about four enter development, 1.5 are launched, and only one succeeds. Innovation is so difficult to master, indeed. I love to share with you five reasons why innovation goes wrong and give you ten ways to reduce your failure rate of innovation.
5 Management Mistakes You Don’t Realize You’re Making
The dictionary defines management as, “the process of dealing with or controlling things or people.” Sometimes, managers don’t understand why their team does not function cohesively. Below are five management mistakes managers don’t realize they’re making and tips to avoid these missteps.
10 Best Board Practices on Innovation Governance – How Proactive is your Board?
All global business and technology trends point in the same direction: there is a need for more proactive and far-sighted management of innovation. Innovation for business reinforcement and growth – and for transformation in particular – are, of course, the prime responsibility of top management. Innovation governance – a holistic approach to steering, promoting and sustaining innovation – is thus becoming a new management imperative.
Design Thinking + Business Model Innovation
There has been a lot of buzz around designing new and innovative business models. But what does it mean to design a new business model? How do you apply design thinking to business model innovation?
10 Commandments of Effective Crowdsourcing
For the companies which have embraced the crowdsourcing mindset in their business processes, the motive is more than just outsourcing. It's about better collaboration, better innovation outcomes and ultimately superior value. But like many other new business models, some fail and some succeed in accomplishing this mission.
Five Ways to Make Your Innovation Culture Smell Better
When it comes to fostering continuous innovation, most organizational cultures stink at it. Industry research provides some interesting statistics which highlight that innovation is not easily obtainable and that companies are not innovating fast enough to repel the unrelenting threat posed by new market entrants with declining barriers to entry.
Working the Crowd – Don’t Get Lost
Utilising crowd led approaches to create value is increasingly familiar in both the literature of business comment and reporting and through our own experience. Crowdassets, as we refer to them, represent a profound and enduring source of innovation and we must adapt and respond to this opportunity. In the fourth of a series of articles focused on Innovation Culture, we are going to provide a more holistic view of the concepts as well as the means to embrace the growing opportunities presented by the crowd empowered ecosystem.
The Critical Lead Time to Eruption in Brainstorming Sessions
Dr. Stephen Sweid has conducted more than a hundred structured group brainstorming sessions in recent years, as well as many one-to-one discussion sessions as a consultant and trainer. He has observed a number of common patterns related to timing and evolution of the brainstorming process.
It Works! The ‘Results Equation’
We are moved by goals. The resolve to reach the finish line pushes us forward: at work, in life. Why then do we keep idea management initiatives alive when it’s not clear what results they deliver (if any)? And how often have we yearned for a formula that definitely makes it all happen?
Seven Signs That Your Innovation Program is at Risk of Failure
There are plenty of examples of innovation program failure at large organizations. In this article, I examine the key markers that I have observed, that indicate a program may be in trouble and at risk of failure.
4 Things to Think About When Launching Your Innovation Program
Launching an innovation program is challenging for a number of reasons. Most of the time, champions of innovation face two main problems: 1) the general challenge of coordinating the various aspects of the innovation department, but also 2) educating the rest of the community about the value of innovation and how it will impact them. Addressing some of the main questions or challenges right off the bat paves the way for innovation success later.