Leveraging Alien Thinking: Exclusive Interview with Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade
For the past decade, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.
Interview with Stefan H. Thomke, Author of “Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments”
I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Stefan H. Thomke, the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School to talk with him about his new book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, to explore the important role that experimentation plays in business and innovation.
Innovation Programs & Entrepreneurship: Busting Myths
A lot of companies aspire to implement successful innovation programs but the programs fail surrounded by certain myths. A seasoned entrepreneur has bust those myths in the article based on his personal experience.
Keen Innovation Lessons from the Music and Video Game Industries
What practical innovation lessons can managers learn from the music and video game industries? Plenty, based on my read of Innovation Playlist: 11 Business Innovation Lessons from the Music and Video Game Industries by Elvin Turner, Chris Parles and Andy Billings.
Book Review: Reverse Innovation
Though not a new concept, “reverse innovation” is hardly straight-forward in practice. Govindarajan and Trimble’s showcasing of successful projects, Fortune 500-type best practice and essential theory in the field endeavors to lay down a modus operandi, yet one which lacks a lasting echo. In this review Jeffrey Phillips argues that despite its good intentions, the book seems to cater only to multinationals, ignoring the needs of small/mid-sized players whose drive is high, yet resources low. Reverse innovation requires a different mind-set, workflow and altogether pace for socially and economically consistent results to emerge.
How to Court Serendipitous Network Intelligence
Most innovators understand what serendipity is. Dictionary.com calls it "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident." But have you ever heard of serendipitous network intelligence?
Generating Creative Ideas with Hieroglyphics
Using hieroglyphics for ideation is an unusual but potentially viable lateral thinking technique from Tom Wujec's excellent book, Five Star Mind.
Sidestep & Twist: Mechanisms Behind the Battle Between Apple, Google, Microsoft & Facebook
James Gardner’s new book takes a look at innovation from another perspective – it’s not always about new ideas but how new ideas are made useful. In this book review René van der Hulst walks us through the three mechanisms Gardner has identified that accelerate acceptance of new products or services and increase competitive boundaries.
Steal Like an Artist: A concise, inspiring guide for creators
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon is a wonderful little book that is designed for anyone who is ever has had a desire to create something amazing, but doesn't know where to start.
The Elastic Enterprise: The first must-read innovation book of 2012
The Elastic Enterprise, a new book from Haydn Shaughnessy and Nicholas Vitalari, describes and decodes an inflection point in organizational strategy and innovation that you must understand if you expect to be able to compete effectively in the years ahead.
5 Essential Questions to Test the Viability of an Idea
Scott Anthony, author of the new book, The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works. How To Do It, has developed a set of 5 questions that he uses to gauge the commercial viability of any new idea.
10 Innovation Lessons from the Movie Moneyball
Very recently I had a pleasant surprise watching Moneyball movie in my local cinemas. I was expecting a typical "losers become winners" movie but it's actually a great story about disruptive innovation. Here are 10 take-aways from this excellent movie.
Clayton Christensen’s New Book on the Disruption of Higher Education
Higher education is heading for disruption. In the new book The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring explore why this is inevitable and what traditional universities and colleges can do about it. Professor Bill Fischer, himself an avid believer in disruption, reviews this book covering an extremely timely subject.
Use Ben Franklin’s technique to become more creative
In Robert Allen Black's creativity book, Broken Crayons: Break Your Crayons and Draw Outside the Lines, the author shares an intriguing story from the autobiography of Ben Franklin that you can adapt to become more creative.
3 Big Benefits of Visual Thinking
Exciting times ahead for innovation managers who understand the value of thinking in pictures. Here's why.
Book Review: Relentless Innovation
In his new book Relentless Innovation, prolific innovation author Jeffrey Phillips looks at innovation from an enterprise-level perspective, encouraging companies to adopt an innovation capability that can be scaled and repeated throughout the firm, rather than attempt the one-off innovation initiatives that are common to big businesses today.
7 Powerful Creative Thinking Hacks from Scott Berkun
We all need help getting out of our well-worn thinking ruts from time to time. When your work or life demands a creative solution but your muse has gone AWOL, why not try one or more of these creative thinking hacks from Scott Berkun's new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds?
The Hidden Driver of Innovation at Apple – Revealed
One of the things that's becoming abundantly clear from reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is that a key to the company's innovation wasn't just Jobs' prodigious talent and relentless drive for creating "insanely great" products. There was also another element that I haven't seen anyone talking about as they eulogize this technology giant.
Innovating the End-to-End Customer Experience at Apple
One of the central themes of Walter Isaacson's powerful Steve Jobs biography is the extent to which Jobs and the Apple team have gone to innovate and manage the customer experience from end-to-end.
A Framework for Thinking about your Approach to Creative Problem Solving
We often approach challenges without considering what mode of thinking we're utilizing to solve them. As a result, we tend to limit the range of possible solutions we're able to generate. To help us take off the blinders and be more aware of our creative problem solving mindset, Chris Griffiths presents a framework called GRASP in his new book, GRASP the Solution.
Book Review:The Innovation Masterplan
Many companies tout innovation in their marketing. Being perceived as innovative is important. But the message and reality can only diverge temporarily. A new book by Langdon Morris is providing a simple but very effective framework to guide CEOs as they address what many perceive as the dilemma of innovation.
A valuable new open innovation primer for small companies from Stefan Lindegaard
How can small companies participate effectively in open innovation? That's the central focus of Stefan Lindegaard's new book, Making Open Innovation Work.
3 Advantages of Challenge-Driven Innovation
In his new book, innovation expert Stephen Shapiro recommends taking a challenge-driven approach to innovation, rather than open-ended idea collection, which tends to be wasteful of human resources and rarely delivers problem-solving ideas.
Predictive Computing and What it Means to Innovators
In this interview with Kevin Maney, co-author of The Two-Second Advantage, I dig deeper into what the rise of predictive computing means to innovators.
The End of Mass Innovation
Marketing guru Seth Godin, in his book We are All Weird, argues that the age of mass markets is over. Furthermore, the alternative to mass is not niche, but weird.
Harvesting Intangible Assets is an Essential Guide to Maximizing the Value of your IP
Harvesting Intangible Assets: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company's Intellectual Property by Andrew Sherman is a clear, comprehensive guide to identifying, managing and leveraging your organizations intellectual assets – which may include patents, trademarks, customer information, software code, databases, business models, systems, processes and employee expertise.
Winning at New Products –Creating Value through Innovation
In a completely revised and updated fourth edition, Robert Cooper reminds us that his Stage-Gate process has become the most widely used method for managing new products in industry today. Stage-Gate is an ideas-to-launch process that encompasses a solid body of knowledge and best practice gleaned from studies of thousands of new product developments.
How to Gain a “Two-Second Advantage”
The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future - Just Enough is a must-read for innovators and strategists. Read on to learn why.