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!
The Future of Civic Engagement and Innovation
Numerous leaders and community organizers have been talking about public service lately, especially in the US - mostly encouraging the public to take place in ongoing dialogues and to volunteer in their communities in order to create positive change at local and national levels.
The Frustrated Innovation Team: What Should They Do?
Many executives talk a lot about innovation, but they don't really know how to make it happen. A corporate innovation team asks themselves: How do we "educate" our executives on innovation management and develop stronger corporate innovation capabilities together?
What Do Innovators Look Like?
Crowdsourced innovation is a tactic used more and more often by government organizations as well as enterprise corporations. This means that innovation teams need to add a new skill set to their resumé: communications.
Picking the Right Stakeholders for Open Innovation
What external stakeholder groups can you tap into to build value for your innovation initiatives? Are your relationships with these external stakeholder groups solid or do you need to do additional work to build good, mutually beneficial working relationships? Are there potential stakeholder groups that you have not yet tapped at all? If so, what is your plan for reaching out to organizations within these pools so that you can further expand your innovation ecosystem? Are your channels for communicating with your external stakeholders strong or do they need further work?
Creativity is Key: Tips on Avoiding Groupthink
It’s awesome when everyone agrees, isn’t it? Yes—and no. Most of us have, at some point, fallen into the trap of groupthink to avoid conflict and promote harmony in a group, whether at school, work, or on a committee. Groupthink has its perks: everyone feels comfortable, and there’s no risk of tension among members. It’s safe. Easy. Unfortunately, it can also kills creativity and innovation.
A Quick Guide to External Collaboration
Working with external partners to bring better products and services to market faster and/or develop better intellectual property has never been more popular in the world of business than what we see today.
How Improvisation can Boost Innovation
If you have an innovative culture already in place (meaning you’re working with stuff like agile project management, design thinking, lean, etc.) perhaps it’s time you consider Applied Improvisation Training. If instead you are a static and uncommunicative company, Applied Improvisation may even work against your innovation efforts. Edoardo Binda Zane explains more.
The Importance of Diversity in Innovation: 3 Tactics to Enrich Workplace Diversity
Many of our customers have asked “what are the most important organizational values to nurture innovation?” Some of them may seem obvious or (at least) familiar: transparency, the embrace of digital solutions, the ability to celebrate failure, but we’re coming to discover that the most important value that you can embrace as part of your innovation programs is diversity.
Pre-suasion: How to Influence With Integrity
Professor Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of influence. This has earned him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation. On this week’s episode, Robert discusses how to enlist the support of your senior managers prior to making an important presentation, how companies can boost their sales productivity by up to 60%, and what we can learn from Warren Buffett on communication.
How to Engage Team Members from Different Branches
Employees located in the same office generally have no lack of interaction and can discuss their projects and demanding tasks together any time. But those who work in different branches and different cities may face real problems with team work. The same happens with those who work remotely and don’t have a physical office. Among the growing number of startups along with big international organizations this problem is growing. Roughly 87% of organizations admit that engagement is one of their top challenges that should be addressed in a proper manner.
Managing Risk and Shortcuts for Project Managers
Project managers are often dealing with loads of stress coming from all fronts, such as the pursuit of deadlines. Pressed by senior managers to deliver, project managers may find themselves resorting to risky shortcuts to make ends meet. Here are some ways to manage these risky shortcuts in project management.
The Most Powerful Question In The World of Business
Michael Bungay Stanier, Founder of Box of Crayons, teaches the principles of how to do less hard work and more good work to managers around the world. In this interview he explains why coaching can transform not only the person receiving the coaching, but also the coach; he reveals what he believes is the best coaching question in the world, and why it is so powerful and AWEsome. And finally, he unpacks habits, how to develop new ones, and their importance in the world of work.
Why Top Executives Do Not Get Innovation – and What to Do About It
Many leaders of corporate innovation efforts struggle to get the support they need from executives higher up in the organization. Top executives can be skilled at talking the talk about innovation, especially in public venues, but frequently fail to walk the walk when it comes to making key choices that determine whether an innovation project will happen or die on the vine.
15 Innovative Meeting Formats that Boost Creativity and Strengthen Engagement
How to organise a meeting in such a way that they result in creativity and energy? How to ensure that people are actively participating instead of being only passively attending meetings?
Defeating the Corporate Antibodies
Change is frightening to many elements inside the typical organization. Change threatens people’s power, their status, their egos, and, in some situations, even their jobs. Change can make someone’s expertise obsolete and thereby make them obsolete as well. Because people are afraid of change, innovation efforts often cause the eruption of corporate antibodies that fight to kill innovation and maintain the status quo.
A Roadmap for Building Corporate Innovation Capabilities
What should a roadmap that helps you develop corporate innovation capabilities look like? How do you bring new thoughts and approaches together with current and past initiatives (both successes and failures) and turn this into a single framework? How do you keep pushing and developing your organization to become more flexible and agile without losing out on the current overall efforts and expected results?
Riding the S-Curve with Whitney Johnson
“Companies don’t disrupt, people do,” says Whitney Johnson, who is best known for her work on driving corporate innovation through personal disruption. She discusses the four things that help you know whether you’re on the right or wrong S-curve and shares examples of how to disrupt a constraint in a company environment. Tune in for more insightful advice.
Creating an Innovation Network with Rob Wolcott
As Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) and a Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Rob Wolcott knows a bit about networking and the politics of innovation. In this episode of Innovation Ecosystem Rob shares practical advice for intrapreneurs who are looking to get stuff done from within the middle of the organization. And for growth leaders of businesses, he also has some great tips about where to get your inspiration!