Unleashing Virtual Creative Collaboration at The Sonophilia Foundation: What Can a Nonprofit Teach Us About Virtual Creative Collaboration
Does creativity suffer in our virtual world, or could working virtually actually lead to more collaborative environments, better ideation and heightened interaction?
Strategic Agility: The Leadership Survival Skill of the Year
Chaos might have defined the year that was 2020, but that turmoil helped business leaders learn a new skill that will serve them well in the years to come.
What Are the Three C’s of Organizational Change?
I hadn’t thought much about health pathology innovation until we started to work with a statewide health pathology service in Australia. They provide pathology, forensic, and analytical services for hospitals and justice systems throughout their state.
A Commitment to Diversity is a Commitment to Innovation
The more you allow disparate ideas to mingle and collide, the more you maximize your chances for true innovative thought to emerge. Learn all of this and more in a complimentary white paper about why innovators want to nurture workforce diversity.
Do Your Employees Need Passion?
If you’ve ever written a job description that calls for passionate, hard-working candidates, did you ever stop to think about what that means? Sure, having engaged and loyal employees is the ultimate goal of any company, but the word “passion” is loaded.
Are Legacy Approaches to Talent Inhibiting Your Innovation Efforts?
The legacy approach to talent selection involves matching education, length of experience and functional skills to the role. All of this makes sense as a baseline, and for well-established professions. But, we argue, selecting talent for innovation requires a whole new approach. Companies must recognize specific innovation skills that drive business outcomes. Yet today, most lack the tools to do so.
How Innovation Fuels a Sense of Purpose in the Workplace
Drawing a connection between innovation and workplace purpose often eludes companies looking to hire the best people for their teams. Let’s take a look at what needs to happen to make this possible.
7 Ways Startups can Foster Innovation through Sustainability
Here’s a spoiler: 90% of all startups fail. The 10% that make it have one thing in common - they all are bringing in innovation through sustainability. These startups are all about evolving by providing faster results with less wastage. It’s a never ending process of innovating for the present and future generations.
5 Strategies for More Effective Employee Onboarding
Over 69 percent of employees are still employed by a company three years after they start if they receive great onboarding. While training for job-specific skills should be part of an onboarding program, it is important that the program helps create connections between new employees and mentors, communicates the company's mission and core values and allows managers to make wise use of their time when bringing a new employee onboard.
The 6 Best Video Streaming Tools for Tech Businesses
With video streaming becoming more and more popular, advancements have made networking much easier and simpler for technology businesses. In addition, they have also become a lot more affordable and practical to use. As tech companies begin to grow, the demand for such tools will also grow, and developers of data streaming tools know this. With that in mind, it is much easier to find many options for streaming tools.
9 Ways to Convert Employees into Intrapreneurs
Companies that encourage and reward intrapreneurship have a great advantage when it comes to retaining the best talents - especially important in today’s creative climate. Here are a few ways that your company can turn your employees into highly-engaged intrepreneurs.
Generating Disruptive Ideas for the Hyper-Digital Era
Disruptive ideas don’t just happen - they must be championed. In doing so, intrapreneurs must address two fundamental truths when leading big idea innovation: that of value creation and that of persuasive communication. If you want to learn how to scale innovation across your enterprise and create a disciplined approach for creating market-changing ideas, One Hour Innovator is a great place to start.
Why Your Business Transformations Fail
Ambitious and impractical business schemes can often lack the fundamental elements needed to make them a reality, leaving huge expense and casualties of the blame game in their wake. The business world is littered with the remnants of unrealised programs and unsuccessful plans for development, several of them so high profile as to have attracted national notoriety.
How to Get Your Innovative Idea off the Ground in the Current Economic Climate
Incredibly, business confidence in the UK is continuing to rise, despite the spectre of Brexit and its potential implications on citizens. Many experts have attribute this to the growth of the manufacturing sector, which recorded a Credit Manager's Index (CMI) score of 62.7 during the first quarter of 2017 and a 1.5% increase from the previous quarter. This hints at significant growth potential for product-oriented firms, which are currently able to increase exports due to a more competitively priced (and fundamentally weaker) pound.
A New Emerging Practice: Innovation Communications
Closed innovation is a thing of the past. Scalable, open innovation as a business practice has yielded the most dramatic and successful results - and communication and connection with your audience is essential to success. By engaging through at least four of eight channels (website, email, social, public relations, partners, events, offline, and beyond), a robust communications process and schedule can yield valuable insights to help you innovate better.
Why Big Data Will Revolutionize B2B Marketing Strategies
B2B, or business to business marketing, involves selling of a company's services or products to another company. Consumer marketing and B2B marketing are really not that different. Basically, B2B uses the same principles to market its product but the execution is a little different. B2B buyers make their purchases solely based on price and profit potential while consumers make their purchases based on emotional triggers, status, popularity, and price. B2B is a large industry. The fact that more than 50 percent of all economic activity in the United States is made up of purchases made by institutions, government agencies, and business gives you a perspective of the size of this industry. Technological advancements and the internet has given B2Bs new [...]
Struggling with Company Culture? Here are 3 Ways to Improve Your Work Environment
Company culture is an extremely important component of a healthy business. Culture serves as the personality of the organization and has a huge impact on the company's reputation with both internal employees and externally with customers and clients. In addition, workplace culture can influence an employee's productivity and results. Companies who focus on building a positive culture will reap the benefits of a motivated and high-achieving workforce as employees will feel much more contented and connected at work.
Leaders Should Listen More and Talk Less
Want to improve your leadership skills? Well, you can start by talking less and listening more. While your oratory skills may impress some, your ability to listen will impress even more. Great leaders understand the importance of surrendering the floor. Unfortunately, most leaders choose to dominate the conversation with rhetoric and fail to engage in proper communication, which requires listening.
Organizational Revolutions through Idea Hacking
Businesses face the dilemma dividing resources between protecting the current value chain and developing new value propositions that in time replace the old ones. Not every organization has the luxury to have its own dedicated innovation unit and still then the ideas might not always be too innovative. Hackathons are an affordable and energizing way to generate innovative ideas that can revolutionize your organization.
Learning to Communicate With Difficult Co-Workers
No matter where you work, there's always some difficult co-workers you're going to have to deal with. Instead of wishing the situation away, which never works, it's time to learn how to perfect your skills for dealing with them.
5 Ways to Use Technology to Improve Employee Engagement, Collaboration and Retention
In today’s workplace, technological innovation is key to retaining your best talent. From telecommuting, to growth and career development, to improved communication and collaboration, and beyond, there are myriad ways you can keep your employees happy and productive.
What Do the Best Innovation Programs Have in Common?
An in-house innovation program is becoming a common fixture in the most competitive organizations. However, in a recessed economy, these research & development programs can sometimes get eliminated, because they struggle to prove or articulate value.
Systematic Idea Generation and Organizational Capabilities for Front-End Innovation Performance in SMEs
This study seeks to answer two key questions about the front-end innovation: when do idea generation activities involving internal and external partner’s payoff, and which organizational capabilities support idea generation activities for achieving high front-end performance?
Trends in Innovation Leaders: Greater Risk and Big Bets
The latest Innovation Leaders research shows that there is an increasing number of high-growth companies that are prepared to take greater risk and make big bets. Rather than focus just on incremental growth, they are being bolder and are seeking to develop more radical innovation opportunities. Despite requiring significant investment and offering no guarantee of success this approach has been transformational for some. Where and why is this happening and what has changed that has made this approach more common?
The Eight Attributes of Bottom-Up Innovation Leaders
Bottom-up innovation is fueled by many ideas initiated by employees, as opposed to top-down innovation, which is fueled by a strong vision - often by the company’s founder. Bottom-up innovation leaders are entrepreneurial, supported by management’s emphasis on creativity and a can-do culture, and often share these eight attributes.
How Employee Diversity Promotes Business Innovation
Lack of diversity among employees hurts a company’s ability to innovate and remain competitive. Diversity - both inherent and acquired - naturally drives innovation through team members’ different abilities to spot gaps, solutions, and opportunities; to avoid groupthink; and to reach clients and customers who were inaccessible before.
Talking 100% Entrepreneurship & 0% Bureaucracy with Heiko Fischer of Resourceful Humans
What do Europe’s most innovative video games company, a US Navy Submarine Captain and Hewlett-Packard have in common? The answer – autonomy, transparency, simplicity and entrepreneurship. Oh and Heiko Fischer! In this episode, sponsored by a-connect, Heiko and Mark discuss how the RH way came into being through Heiko’s time at Crytek, how the core principles behind the RH philosophy “100% entrepreneurship, 0% bureaucracy” work in practice, and how gamification in the workplace can help us solve the problem of unproductive meetings (among other things).
Collaborative Innovation – Hamburger Style
Often I read articles or books about top-down vs. bottom-up innovation and why one approach would be better than the other. After spending more than five years in the collaborative innovation space, I would advise going hamburger style!