Leadership is one of the keys is to an innovative culture, according to Stephen Shapiro, in his excellent book, 24/7 Innovation. Without effective leadership, it is almost impossible for an organization to make the transition to an innovative, entrepreneurial culture. To successfully lead this change, Shapiro says that leaders need to do a number of things well.

One of the key themes of Stephen Shapiro's excellent book, 24/7 Innovation, is customer-focused innovation. In it, he explains how customers -- who now have an unprecedented number of choices and unparalleled access to product information prior to the sale -- now control the buying process. To be successful, organizations must "hire" their key customers, and make them an integral part of their new product development and business redesign efforts. Here's how...

Stephen Shapiro, in his excellent book, 24/7 Innovation, offers a valuable outline of the characteristics of pervasive innovation, and what makes it different than earlier change movements (such as process reengineering, total quality management and just-in-time inventory management).

Stephen Shapiro, in his excellent book, 24/7 Innovation, explains the difference between box and line thinking, and why most opportunities for innovation within organization can be found in the latter category.

I recently started to read Stephen Shapiro's book, 24/7 Innovation, and discovered this neat analogy about "box thinking" vs. "line thinking," and how it can affect a firm's ability to innovate: "The boxes that most people operate in are focused on activities, computers, people or departments within a company. But it is the lines, the interconnections and interdependencies between the boxes, where innovation emerges. Innovative thinking comes from making connections. Connections between boxes. Connections between ideas. Connections between companies. Focusing on the lines frees an organization to improve within the guidelines of the simple structure." This is a great analogy. When I think of boxes – like the symbols on an organizational chart – I think of something that draws [...]

It's often fascinating to hear the stories behind the products and services that we love to use. Two that come to mind are Post-it notes (developed by Art Fry of 3M to help him find pages in his church song book) and Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid instant film technology. With the publishing of their new book this week, The Cancer Code, Mindjet LLC co-founders Michael and Bettina Jetter have joined the pantheon of inventors with amazing stories to tell. What's unique about this story is that Michael Jetter conceived and developed a mind mapping software program -- MindMan 1.0 (later rechristened MindManager) -- while undergoing treatment in a leukemia isolation ward in Germany in 1994. Faced with the [...]

In their excellent book, The Innovator's Solution, authors Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor make the point that the most successful new products help customers do jobs better, faster or more efficiently than they could before. I recently came across two references to the changing face of customer-focused innovation, and how much of traditional marketing just doesn't connect with what customers really want: Creating a Killer Product is a book excerpt from The Innovator's Solution that Forbes Magazine just published online this week. This paragraph is a great synopsis of what customer-focused innovation needs to accomplish -- and how traditional marketing and research can miss these needs by a long shot: "Much of the art of marketing focuses on identifying groups [...]

I recently started reading Clayton Christensen's excellent new book, The Innovator's Solution. Even though I'm only a few chapters into it, I've already had had my assumptions of what constitutes disruptive innovation shaken by Christensen's compelling writing. I naturally assumed that disruptive innovations involve a radically new business model (such as Amazon.com or Dell Computer's) or a radically new product idea that offers customers an exciting new package of features, benefits or advantages. According to Christensen, a much more common form of disruption is this: Disruptive innovators don't try to go head-to-head with entrenched competitors, because that is usually a losing game. Instead, they enter the low end of the market, which is typically underserved by larger, entrenched competitors, and [...]

In their new book, Creativity Inc.: Building An Inventive Organization, authors Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman make a key point that organizations need to keep in mind as they implement creativity and innovation initiatives: Just as people have different tolerance levels for risk, your employees also have a variety of levels of comfort with creativity and the risks that involves. "In the creative effort in any company, people play at the edge of their familiar universe -- sometimes momentarily, sometimes for months -- putting together something that, for them, has never been conceived before. Then they take the new creation back for evaluation to the organization, where an established web of expectations probably resists the newness of the concept." "Some [...]

In their excellent book, Creativity Inc.: Building An Inventive Organization, authors Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman provide some fascinating commentary on information flows that support creativity. Without free-flowing information, they suggest that a firm cannot successfully embrace the conflict, risk-taking, diversity and intrinsic motivation that is necessary to develop an innovative culture. "Creatively healthy companies have a high volume of diverse information that flows freely throughout the organization, increasing the likelihood of collision among beliefs, presumptions, possibilities and new facts. These sorts of collisions can lead to the breaking and making of connections and the creation of new ideas." Surprisingly, the authors don't focus on collaboration technologies that enable information flows. Instead, they detail several organizational models that seem to [...]

Some businesspeople may assume that the corporate suggestion box has gone the way of the dinosaurs, or that it's a dusty old relic of the 20th century -- no longer appropriate for the Information Age. Robert Tucker disagrees. In his excellent book, "Driving Growth Through Innovation," Tucker says the suggestion box can still be a potent tool for tapping the creative ideas of your employees. He cites one program at American Airlines, called IdeAAs, that has saved the company millions of dollars per year. Like most successful suggestion box systems, American Airlines pays employees a bonus based on some percentage of the cost savings produced by each implemented idea, which provides a very attractive incentive for employees to share their [...]

I'm now in the process reading the book, "A Passion for Ideas" by Heinrich v.Pierer and Bolko v.Oetinger. It contains a series of chapter-length essays and one-on-one interviews with innovators from all walks of life. Several of the themes covered in this book have helped me to think more broadly about innovation and its role in business and society. Here are two examples: One German author outlined the great extent to which a country's culture and its government's support of innovation (or lack thereof) influences the climate for new ideas – a concept that I never really thought about until now. According to this author, Germany's conservative work ethic has always prized working in a trade or profession for a [...]

I'm now in the process of reading The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen by Bunji Tozawa and Norman Bodek. From the standpoint of innovation, it has a very interesting premise: The authors believe that most corporate suggestion systems fail because they ask employees to submit ideas for improvements, but then their ideas are turned over to other people for implementation -- if they were ever implemented at all. Over time, employees learn that the odds of their ideas being used are very slim, and so they stop submitting suggestions. Quick and easy kaizen, in contrast, is based on the idea that every employee is creative, and has dozens of ideas on how to improve the work processes and tasks [...]

In his excellent book, Leading the Revolution, author Gary Hamel points out that most companies are extremely risk averse when it comes to developing and nurturing ideas and innovations. Too often, nascent ideas are strangled by corporate policies that tend to kill, rather than nurture, promising new ideas and business concepts. As an alternate approach, Hamel recommends drawing upon the successful new business model pioneered by Silicon Valley. Despite last year's technology market crash, Hamel maintains that the venture capital method of funding new companies and innovations is actually quite efficient. Even the most successful venture capitalist can't predict which entrepreneur's idea will become the next Google or the next Microsoft. So it picks those ideas and companies that look [...]

As business becomes increasingly based upon knowledge and ideas, it’s becoming more important for knowledge workers to become more "information literate" -– comfortable with continuous learning, creative thinking and problem-solving and who have the ability to synthesize diverse bits of information to form new insights and ideas. In his new book, "Content Critical," author Gerry McGovern outlines the characteristics and skills of the information literate: They read a lot, are hungry for new ideas, and are always inquisitive. They have strong research skills. They know where to go to find information, and don't depend on a single content source. They know how to cope with information overload, and are able to quickly tell good information from bad. They write well, [...]

I just started reading a book last week called "Content Critical," by Gerry McGovern. Its main focus is on why organizations need to adopt standards for "publishing" their content to the Web. What does this book have to do with creativity and innovation? Here's the connection: In the beginning of the book, McGovern explains that the original intent of the World Wide Web was to enable researchers at academic institutions to share their ideas and collaborate more effectively. The early, text-based Web filled this role admirably. Now that almost anyone can create and publish Web pages, we seem to have lost sight of that early, innovative vision. The Web has become filled with billions of documents, many of questionable quality, [...]