Validate Your Pivot with Innovation
When planning or navigating a pivot, how do you know if you are pivoting in the right direction? Answer simple questions to validate your pivot and execute on four actions to help create speed-to-market.
How Frontline Employees Drive the Change Management Process
Organizational change can be met with resistance, especially if it excludes employee input.
Six Questions Every Leader Must Answer – If They Want to Lead Change
If you want to lead a transformation in the business, then you have to sell the idea over and over again to people throughout the organisation. In particular, the leader has to answer these questions which are present in people’s minds even if they are unspoken.
5 Steps to Embed Innovation in Your Daily Working Life
Innovation is a word that’s been heard on the lips of more CEOs, read in more broadsheet papers, and detailed in more business magazines in the last ten months than ever before. It’s well regarded that those businesses that fail to innovate risk death; consider the sad fates of longstanding companies like Woolworths, Polaroid, Blockbuster, and Borders over the last ten years. But how, as an individual, can you incorporate innovation and creative thinking into your everyday working life, all while keeping up with the already manic pace of modern business?
Heading for Mass Extinction
Global diversity is in crisis. Scientists have recently announced that our planet is in the middle of the sixth global mass extinction event and this time it’s man-made. Not since the time of the dinosaurs have so many species been under threat and it’s not just the environmental infrastructure which should be giving us cause for concern.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Innovation
Innovation has become a bit of a business buzzword. Every CEO and CIO worth their salt wants to be seen to be on the forefront, bringing new products and services to a market. However, it doesn’t always go to plan, and rushing in to things head first without the proper due diligence can land a company in hot water.
25 Steps to Jump-Start your Innovation Journey
We’ve covered some essential ground to help you prepare your innovation journey, and now it’s time to put these concepts into action. The innovation formula addresses the very specific tasks that have to be accomplished for innovation to emerge from your organization not only as a matter of luck or at random, but through a concentrated effort that results in sustained innovation performance. Here you will find the Taking Action steps along with 25 additional suggestions that we hope will help you to think and plan creatively and productively about how to make innovation a reality in your organization.
Taking Action: Your Innovation Master Plan
The focus of the The Innovation Formula is on the innovation process that makes sense for small businesses, where lean, simple, and fast are essential. You may also be interested in a view of the innovation process that’s suited to larger companies, so this chapter provides an overview of the Innovation Master Plan framework that we use when we’re working with larger organizations on innovation projects and initiatives.
Build a Fast and Efficient Innovation Team
Since we’re obliged to pursue innovation in a competitive marketplace, speed matters. In fact, it matters a great deal, for your competitors aren’t waiting, and you cannot afford to allow them to get too far ahead. The faster you recognize new trends, threats, and opportunities, the faster great ideas get discovered and created, the faster they get to market, the faster you earn money, build brand, and extend the relevance and reach of your firm into the future.
Designing Your Innovation Portfolio
The process of designing and developing your own innovation portfolios occurs as a series of steps that are described in a sequence because the output of one step will help you to think about the subsequent ones. The process builds towards design conclusions and decisions about the choices you’ll have to make, and then the investments that will back them up. In this chapter excerpt, Langdon Morris walks us through the process.
Managing Risk with Your Innovation Portfolio
Probably the single greatest threat to most small businesses is “concentration risk,” also known as “keeping all your eggs in one basket.” In this chapter excerpt of of The Innovation Formula Langdon Morris discusses innovation portfolio design, and how it translates the goals and intents of your aims and strategy into a set of risk-managed innovation projects.
Market Mapping for Sustainable Growth
In this chapter excerpt from The Innovation Formula Langdon Morris explains how to use a map to help you locate your company in the market, to see clearly how it compares with the competition, and then to use this assessment to chart a future path toward success. The goal is to find the very best high reward, low-risk ideas that will change the market, amplify your profits, increase your relevance, and sustain your organization’s viability over the long term.
Five Forces of Complexity and Change
In this chapter of The Innovation Formula Langdon Morris examines five forces of change: technology, science, culture, the human population and climate change. The convergence of these five trends largely defines the modern world and the market environment to which we must adapt and respond. Understanding them will set the framework for the choices you will have to make, and the processes you will implement in order to create and implement your own organization’s innovation process.
Elements of The Innovation Formula
In the first chapter of The Innovation Formula for small business leaders and entrepreneurs, Langdon Morris explained the importance of questions and maps that describe competition, change, the future, innovation and strategy that are intended to help you understand the significant forces that are shaping business today, and to harness the ones that are already shaping tomorrow. In the second chapter, we look at a third core element that this book is organized around, which is the innovation formula.
Innovation in the SME and Entrepreneurial Context
Innovation is as important for small business as for large ones, but most of the books and other writings available focus on the big firms. In his new book The Innovation Formula, Langdon Morris provides insights for the small business leader or entrepreneur about how to be fantastically successful at innovation even with very limited time and capital to invest.
Innovation: Force Fields for Change
This article relates selected multidirectional patterns of change—“force fields”—in the business environment to innovation strategy within the context of Zen philosophical principles. Three force fields are selected for brief evaluation: 1) domestic vs. global markets, 2) economic growth vs. environmental quality, and 3) entrepreneurs vs. customer base. Given the omnipresence of force fields in the 21st century, businesses should maintain flexible structures for innovating both incrementally and radically. They also need to engage in collaboration at all institutional levels. Collaboration can facilitate the Zen objective of integrating conflicting ideas, a key feature of innovation over the long run.
Be Ready for the Next Major Technology Shifts in Your Industry
Technological and industry shifts are important drivers of innovation. Look no further than the advent of the mobile broadband Internet and the shift to the era of intelligent, connected devices. Even though shifts are difficult to anticipate, they often lead to fundamental business changes. Staying up to date with these changes is vital.
Transforming How We Work
The essence of agility is the ability to respond to new and different conditions. You cannot continue repeating the same old operating formula long beyond its utility or you will be left behind. Are you prepared to adapt to the profuse variety of new circumstances with new tactics and strategies? The principles of Agile that we examine in the next three chapter excerpts of Agile Innovation will help you understand what you need to do.
Adaptability and Collaboration for Sustainable Business Growth
The four simple axioms in the “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development” express the core values for getting work done efficiently. In the last chapter excerpt of Agile Innovation we looked at individuals and interactions as well how to create a rapid working prototype. Today we’ll continue discussing the next elements: collaboration and carrying out change in a corporate setting.
Becoming Agile Rapidly and Painlessly
To take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s unique opportunities, and to rise above the intense existential challenges your firm will face in the months and years ahead, it will be supremely helpful and confer enormous advantages if your operations embody the Agile essence: quick, responsive, dynamic, innovative. You’ve got to learn to recognize opportunities and to act on them faster than your competitors do. In this chapter excerpt of Agile Innovation Langdon Morris explores what Agile means in detail, with a focus on the roots of the Agile movement and its many insights and implications for today’s organizations.
The Secret Sauce of Innovation
Could it be that today’s pervasive bad news, the news that causes everyone else to moan and complain—the economic malaise, the chaos that the digital revolution created, the impacts of outsourcing, political instability, global competition—can offer amazing opportunities to out- distance your competition? In this second chapter excerpt from the new book, Agile Innovation, Langdon Morris explores innovation-under-duress.
Starting at Sprint Zero: A Better Way to Innovate
How is Agile changing the world? Let’s begin with a bit of background. If you are new to Agile Software technique, then the term sprint zero, as used in the title of this chapter, may not mean much to you, but for Agile practitioners it means the initial phase of work where you sort the project out to make sure you start properly when you’re about to tackle a large programming endeavor.
Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity
Charles Darwin said it quite well: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Innovation, collaboration, and improvisation are indeed essential forces shaping all of business and all of modern life, and they’ve become vitally important for the individual, the organization, and indeed for all of society.
Three Common Ways Organizations Trip When It Comes to Innovation
Innovation appears prominently as part of almost any company’s strategy. Why then is it so hard to make it repeatable, scalable and lasting success? Scholars name key elements that bring innovation in sync, such as leadership, strategy and governance. Often, though, it’s not what organizations aren’t doing that causes a problem, but what they are doing—they’re tripping themselves up.
Market Intelligence Oriented Culture: a Key Driver for Innovation
It is always a great achievement when we can affirm that something has been done according to one strategic plan, goal or thought. Sound strategic planning capabilities depend on industry/sector specific understanding and full perception of the external competitive environment. In the sixth and last of a series of articles focused on Innovation Culture, the focus is on a process called Market Intelligence (MI). This process can be affirmed as a cyclic, continuous organizational process that deals with dispersed data, information and knowledge in a competitive sector, to produce knowledge to be applied by companies in their strategic marketing planning.
The Death of Innovation Crowdsourcing (As We Know It)!
Ideation focused crowdsourcing has been around for some time, but the approach is often not producing the desired business results in order to justify continued investments. How does the model need to change in order to drive real business value?
Community Innovation is Led by Positive Deviants
Positive Deviance (PD) is an idea which is based on the observed principle that in any community there are people who adopt unusual and successful approaches to problems that beset the whole community. These people are the ‘positive deviants.’
Taxis vs. Uber: A Perfect Example of Resistance to Change
In cities all over the world an ugly war is being fought by “traditional” taxi companies against a new form of competition from Uber and other ride-sharing services. This article points out three things traditional taxi companies have in common with businesses of the past.