The Top Practices That Separate Great Leaders From The Rest
How do great leaders separate themselves from the rest? This article will examine how several excellent leaders, including Rich Teerlink and Steve Jobs, were able to inspire their teams, develop incredible products, and transform their companies.
How Automation is Innovating Recruitment
Technology has changed the world so much over the last few decades and there are no signs of it slowing down any time soon. With advances coming in too quickly for most of us to process, it may feel like keeping things old fashioned is for the best. However, automation in the recruitment process may be the revolution that your company needs.
How NASA Leads Intrapreneurial Innovation
Not everyone knows that NASA has embedded crowdsourcing into their strategy and capabilities. But in fact, back in 2011 (after they ran a highly successful crowdsourcing pilot) NASA established the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI).
Quantum Computing, Zen Philosophy and Space-Time
The up-and-coming field of quantum computing, currently in a prototype phase, will probably be an innovation with exponential and wide-ranging impacts in the power and speed of information technology. There are some interesting parallels between the behavior of quantum computing particles, or qubits, and basic principles of Zen Buddhist philosophy. Like modern physics, this article employs a “space-time” concept of innovation, with implications for the process and intensity of new idea development within organizations.
How Do You Define INNOVATIVENESS? Getting it Wrong Could Cost You
Underlying an innovative culture driven by an innovative leader is innovativeness. Innovativeness drives business growth by increasing innovation opportunities.
Emotional Intelligence: Why is It Pivotal to Good Leadership?
Emotional Intelligence has long been known for being one of the main qualities of a good leader. Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman wrote “What Makes a Leader”, a popular article from 1998, where he lists emotional intelligence as one of the main leadership components.
Navigating A Changing World – 10 Principles for Future Leaders
How can those at the top ensure they and their organizations are fit for the future? Perhaps the biggest challenge facing leaders today is to ensure they are capable of navigating themselves and their organizations through a complex and rapidly evolving future landscape. The reality is becoming clear, a good future focused leader has to have a “futurist mindset”.
How to Encourage Employees to Have a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Having the right work-life balance is integral to maintaining one's health. A poor work-life balance can have serious ramifications, including chronic stress and burnout.
Zen Philosophy for Stretching Innovation Space-Time
The non-duality principle of Zen philosophy suggests a more intensive approach to the dimensions of innovation “space-time.” Business teams should stop following a simple sequential procedure in which new ideas are accepted or rejected almost as soon as they arise. Instead, they should take extra time and create a “learning space” or study environment for all of the new ideas in place of the typical reactive, judgmental, for-or-against decision-making process. Connections between these ideas may lead to further innovation opportunities.
Innovation Leaders Are Good at These Three Things
IdeaScale has honored innovation leaders in their annual Innovation Management Awards for six years now. Award recipients have come from almost every industry with a variety of goals (from eradicating cancer to identifying new university technology best practices), but this year’s winners share a few key characteristics that all innovation leaders need to embody.
Increasing R&D Spending Will Not Lead to Innovation, But This Will
In an analysis of high performance innovators (called in this article the “Global Innovation 1000”), researchers made a surprising discovery: “spending more money does not open the doors to innovation.”
How to Manage Third-Party Risk when Outsourcing Your Software Development
Protect your business by discovering how to lower third-party risk when order custom software development.
5 ways Chief Product Officers can Foster Innovation
A chief product officer’s (CPO) job description often contains two tall tasks: Drive innovation, and create a compelling product roadmap that delivers business value.
How Education Can Advance and Innovate Your Business
Education is a powerful vehicle for professional growth. It’s now more affordable, and recent technological innovations have made it easier for employees to acquire and advance their skillsets.
Changes to Drive More Value from Your Innovation / Ideation Platform
In our previous article we focused on some of the serious issues being faced by clients and vendors who are working with innovation / ideation platforms.
Smarter Networking to Improve Your Company’s Visibility
External networking serves many purposes for a company, and modern digital marketing has become a combination of marketing, customer service, and public relations. Social media and other platforms also allow industry experts and organizations to engage in public conversation about important topics, so being involved and engaged in business and local communities is vital to a company’s success in order to appeal to modern socially conscious audiences.
How Technology Can Augment Human Collaboration
Innovation requires collaboration, but collaboration is stuck in a rut. Data science can help us climb out. It can increase the scale, the intentionality, and the nuance of how we collaborate. With the right data and algorithms, we can set our teams up to do something innovative.
Why Aptitude Tests Are Important for Jobs in Innovation
Innovation is one of the main ways in which a business can differentiate itself from the competition. Innovation could take place by improving business processes or by entering new markets after upgrading current product and service offerings. To be innovative, companies need creative employees who have the ability to transform ideas into reality.
Ready to Drive Global Innovation?
Everyone is mesmerized by the mystery and magic of innovation and new technologies through AI, Blockchain, IoT, AR/VR, Digital Ecosystems and more. Conversations center around the latest products and services as well as the future impact of a digital life. Yet there is one question that is surprisingly overlooked in many circles - how will leaders and teams innovate and collaborate in a changing business world?
5 Tips to Build a Strong and Successful Team
You may be the mastermind behind the business idea that has led to establishing your company, but your employees are the backbone of its success. No brand, no matter how necessary it may be, is immune to failure caused by poor internal structure and leadership.
It’s All About Interaction!
The central role of Interaction Design when creating delightful customer experiences
Organisations depend on their competitive advantage in order to become or keep successful, relevant for their customers and grow over time. As we all know, competitive advantage is achieved via either one – or a combination - of the strategies involving pricing, service and product quality or customer service excellence. We argue that another overarching strategy should always be present in a company’s strategy; delivering an excellent, desirable and memorable customer experience.
Innovation and Process Automation for Small Businesses
In the world of small businesses, there are only three golden rules you need to keep in mind:
Strengthening Your Intra- and Inter-Department Partnership – The Welcome Side Effect of Design Thinking
Imagine a world where customer service, procurement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and sales can truly help each other and work together, instead of stepping on each others’ toes and pointing fingers. A world where all parts of the organizations work together with a shared sense of purpose, no matter how different their cultures, processes, and systems, have been in the past.
The Key Challenges of Government Innovation
Last month, leaders in public sector innovation gathered to discuss ways of crowdsourcing new solutions to longstanding problems at IdeaScale’s Open Nation DC. Speakers from a range of agencies as diverse as the FDA and the US Coast Guard presented best practices on creating actionable change in government.
The Value of Innovation at a Time of Crisis
We often talk about the role of innovation in an age of constant, radical disruption, as defined by the 4th industrial revolution. Within this new environment, innovation leaders should play an essential role in helping the organization thrive and drive growth.
Want Innovative Employees? Use These 6 Innovative Hiring Methods
How many times have you read a candidate’s cover letter and found yourself actually dozing off? How many times have you (figuratively) rolled your eyes when candidates answer the question “what’s your greatest weakness” with “perfectionism”? How many times have you bored yourself asking that question?
Musings of an Apprentice: Business Thinking Meets Design Thinking to Create a Design-led company
Abstract: A perspective of a redesigned, reformed and transformed business design professional. The author shares her journey, experience, progress, and point of view on today's often discussed "design thinking or building a design-led innovation culture."
How Can Personalization Improve Your Business Impact?
If there’s one mistake that marketers keep repeating, it is treating their customer base as a demographic instead of as a group of individuals. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that personalizing your message increases your engagement rate while personalizing your brand as a whole tends to give your customer loyalty a boost.
How to Effectively Manage the Fuzzy Back End of Innovation
You have doubtless heard of the fuzzy front end of innovation. It is another name for idea generation. But Jeffrey Baumgartner believes that the back end of innovation, where implementation is supposed to take place, is just as fuzzy. Many companies lack clear, efficient processes for implementing the ideas they generate.
How R+D Can Build Marketing Support for its Ideas
Last week, we introduced the topic of R&D's frequent lack of marketing support for its ideas and some culturally ingrained attitudes that can contribute to this. This communication gap is frustrating, especially for those in R&D whose role it is to develop and sell-in new initiatives. This week, we continue this discussion and describe strategies to help overcome resistance.
Why Marketing Doesn’t Want R+D’s Ideas – and what to do about it
One of the most common frustrations expressed by R+D professionals is that marketing lacks interest in their ideas. Why is this often the case, and what can be done about it?
A Lesson for Building your New Business Opportunity Case
Many would-be innovators share a common frustration: persistent difficulty in gaining traction for their new ideas with the people they need to cultivate in order to advance them. Why do they often struggle? There are numerous reasons, but a common one is that they all too often rely on opinions to make their case instead of applying facts and data.
Creativity: Why it’s Better to Turn your Problems into Goals
When it comes to creative problem solving, which is more effective? Focusing on the problem at hand, or on setting goals for what we'd like to accomplish? Jeffrey Baumgartner explores this perplexing question and comes to a very clear conclusion.
Product Innovation: Unifying People, Processes and Tools
Product innovation is not simply about generating new ideas. It is a complex process, and many organizations struggle with the design and implementation of an effective innovation strategy that yields measurable results over the long-term. Sustained growth and profitability can be achieved through the integration of three critical levels: People, processes and tools.