What is business model innovation?
Chances are, you've heard of business model innovation. But what is it, really? Peter Skarczynski and Rowan Gibson, in their new book, Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming How Your Company Innovates, provide a very clear and understandable explanation of this concept.
Adapting the venture capital model to corporate innovation
One of the recurring themes in Gary Hamel's excellent new book, The Future of Management, is the idea that companies tend to overinvest in the past at the expense of the future. Often, promising new ideas are starved for funding, or are unfairly held to the same metrics as well-established billion-dollar business units. Isn't there some way to set resources free within larger organizations, Hamel asks?
Innovation technique: Define your ideal competitor
Paul Sloane's new book, The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity, contains a fascinating innovation exercise that can help you to identify new opportunities for your business, and hopefully prevent it from being blindsided by an unexpected competitor. Here's how it works.
The problem with problem definition
Arthur VanGundy, in his new book, Getting to Innovation: How Asking the Right Questions Generates the Great Ideas Your Company Needs, says that many companies have a problem with problem definition. They make assumptions and rush into generating ideas before clearly defining the problem or challenge at hand. As a result, much manpower and many ideas go to waste.
Strategies for implementing customer innovation
Patricia Seybold, in her new book Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-design Your Company's Future, offers some valuable strategies that your company can use to implement customer-focused innovation. Of course, if you're going to place customers at the center of your innovation initiatives, you can no longer sit in your cubicle dreaming up new product ideas and tossing them over the wall to product development and marketing. No, you actually have to engage with your customers and prospects. But how? Patricia offers these recommended strategies.
Enhance your creativity through storytelling
In Dan Pink's excellent book, A Whole New Mind, one of the seven principles for succeeding in today's "conceptual age" is story - the ability to create and share compelling narratives. Here are two exercises that can help you to improve your narrative capabilities.
Evaluating an Idea’s Potential Using ‘PPC’
Most of us have a tendency to discard ideas too quickly, because we cannot see the potential value. Gary Bertwistle of Blue Moon Creative, author of the new book The Keys to Creativity, has come up with a technique that he calls PPC, which stands for Positives, Potentials and Concerns, that can help you to overcome this tendency.
Metrics: A balanced scorecard for innovation
In their excellent book, Making Innovation Work, authors Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton present an approach to metrics that they call "the balanced scorecard for innovation." Here's how it works.
Why does innovation feel uncomfortable?
Helping people to deal with change is one of the most challenging tasks that leaders of innovation face. GoInnovate!, an excellent new book by Andrew Papageorge, contains a wealth of advice that can help your organization to overcome resistance to change and to successfully implement a culture of innovation.
Functional silos are a barrier to innovation
According to Robert Tucker, author of the book, Driving Growth Through Innovation, one of the reasons that innovation has not become embedded as a key driver of growth and profitability in many organizations is because [...]