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.
Creative Strength Training
Creativity: a highly sought-after skill which can be illusive in times of need. The big question is what can we do about it? Whether you’re a professional artist, dancer, comedian, scientist, inventor or entrepreneur, you will experience the highs and lows, inspiration, frustration, self-criticism, doubt, and problem solving within your personal creative process. In the end, we’re all bringing something new into the world and hoping it will find its place and be well-received by others.
Inspiring Business Lessons from the World’s Greatest Thinkers and Innovators
Otto von Bismarck once said, “Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.” In Paul Sloane’s latest book, Think Like an Innovator, you will learn from the struggles and accomplishments of 76 of the world’s greatest thinkers: artists, business leaders, geniuses, inventors, mavericks, pioneers, scientists and visionaries.
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?
New book from Curt Rosengren explores creative strategies for revitalizing your work and life
I've long been a fan of Curt Rosengren's Occupational Adventure weblog, and its focus on injecting a healthy dose of entrepreneurial passion into your work. So I was very glad to hear that he is planning to publish a book in the next few weeks. Entitled "101 Ways to Get Wild About Work: Ideas for Turning Dreams into Reality," it is packed with thought-provoking insights and exercises that you can put into action today to revolutionize how you approach your talents, dreams, aspirations and ideas.
Innovation and management dogma
In his new book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel says that one of the biggest and most deeply entrenched impediments to innovation in any corporation is management dogma, the unwritten beliefs and rules for "how we do business around here." He outlines a number of key questions that you can use to begin to uncover deeply held beliefs about management, so they can be discussed openly and alternatives considered.
Three impediments to innovation: Gary Hamel
In his excellent new book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel acknowledges that there are many barriers to innovation, but singles out three that he believes can be particularly destructive, because they're practically invisible to most leaders.
Innovation and skills agility
As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, driven by increased global collaboration and rapid advances in technology, a growing need will be for organizations to locate the right skills base to carry its innovation initiatives forward. So says Jim Carroll, author of the new book, Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.
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.
New: Stephen Shapiro’s Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas
Innovation expert Stephen Shapiro (author of the book, 24-7 Innovation), has just published a new e-book of innovation tips entitled the Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas. It contains over 75 tips to help you to increase the creative potential of your employees, make innovation repeatable and sustainable, and create an organic culture of innovation.
Who should manage innovation projects?
At many organizations, innovation projects are often assigned to young, ambitious junior executives. But these efforts tend to be doomed to failure, according to Paul Sloane, writing in his new book, The Innovation Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity.
New book by Paul Sloane: The Innovative Leader
Popular InnovationTools author Paul Sloane recently sent me a copy of his latest book, The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity. I've just started reading it, but I can already tell that I'm really going to like it. The book is not a long, academic tome about business innovation and creativity, but rather is broken up into numerous bite-sized chunks of one to two pages each. This makes it easy for busy innovators to digest, as well as making it a practical reference volume on your bookshelf.
Michael Raynor: The Strategy Paradox
Michael Raynor, co-author of of The Innovator's Solution with Clayton Christiansen, has written a new book entitled The Strategy Paradox: When Committing to Success Leads to Failure and What To Do About It. The premise of this book is an intriguing one: making a commitment to an innovative, risky strategy, which carries with it the potential of great success and excellent return on investment, is just as likely to produce a spectacular failure.
Three steps companies must make to see innovation opportunities
In his new book, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy, author Erich Joachimsthaler outlines three steps that companies must take in order to remove their blinders and see new innovation opportunities.
Idea systems and corporate culture
James A. Schwarz, in his new book, The A to Z of Idea Management for Organizational Improvement and Innovation, points out that you can't just bolt an idea system onto a corporate culture that is closed to new ideas. It requires a complete transformation of the corporate culture.
Intriguing new creative problem solving book follows ‘business fable’ format
When Chicago creativity consultant Gregg Fraley set out to write a book about creative problem solving, he decided that this book category needed...well, innovation. Not content to publish yet another me-too tome about creative problem solving (CPS) techniques, Fraley instead wrote Jack's Notebook, an inspiring business fable that illuminates one person's creative journey.
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.
The enemies of innovation
Why do so many innovation initiatives fail? Geoffrey Moore, author of the new book Dealing With Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, has some fresh insights into this ongoing challenge.
Innovation strategy: Prune the product tree
In his new book, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, author Luke Hohmann shares a very interesting group brainstorming exercise that can be quite helpful to teams that are trying to envision the future of their product or service offerings. It's called Prune the Product Tree, and here's how it works.
Innovation strategy: Leveraging the power of being an outsider
Why is it that, in industry after industry, it's almost always the outsider that develops the breakthrough innovations? Paul Graham, in a ChangeThis essay entitled The Power of the Marginal, tackles this issue and comes up with some really intriguing insights. He deconstructs the power of the outsider, and offers some helpful strategies for thinking like one.
The Innovation Killer tackles the human side of innovation
Many innovation books today are written to teach us new frameworks, strategies or best practices for making innovation work in our organizations. What's been lacking, however, are business books on how to tackle the people side of innovation. Fortunately for us, Cynthia Barton Rabe has decided to focus on this aspect of the topic in her new book, The Innovation Killer - How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine and What Smart Companies are Doing About It.
The promise of open-source innovation
In their new book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, authors William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre offer some fascinating perspectives and case histories on the topic of open-source innovation.
Use a strategy canvas to identify innovation opportunities
In their excellent book, Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne share a fascinating technique for visualizing competitive differentiation and innovation opportunities. Called the "strategy canvas," it is both a diagnostic tool to show you what your current competitive situation looks like as well as a planning tool for identifying untapped innovation opportunities.
The middle ground of innovation
When companies start up a new venture to explore a breakthrough innovation, there are many challenges. Some are operational, but others are caused by the ways in which leaders and managers typically think about their work. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, in their new book, 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, describe how companies often get lost in the gap between the beginning of the innovation process, were creativity is needed, and the end of the innovation process, were efficiency is needed.
How many ways are there to solve a problem?
In his marvelous Idea Book, Fredrik Haren tells the story of a teacher who wanted her students to measure the height of a house using only a barometer. The "correct" answer she was looking for was that they should use the barometer to measure the difference in air pressure at the ground and the top of the house, and utilize that data to calculate the height of the house. One enterprising student, however, came up with some other unique yet valid solutions to this problem - which the teacher did not accept. This anecodote reminds us that there is more than one correct answer for any problem.
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.
Creative synthesis techniques from A Whole New Mind
I recently started reading Dan Pink's fascinating book, A Whole New Mind, and I'm really enjoying the exercises that he recommends at the end of each chapter. The principle of "symphony" - Dan's term for symthesis, the ability to create innovative new combinations and connections between seemingly unrelated bits of information - contains some especially interesting exercises. Here are several of them that I would like to share with you.