How to Digitally Spark Corporate Innovation
To maintain relevance in the global competitive market, many companies already focus on the development and implementation of innovations, even using digital tools. But, in times of crisis, this focus is most likely to be lost when most businesses concentrate on keeping the daily business running.
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.
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!
The One Skill that Innovators Forget
Most innovators cultivate traits like creative risk taking, positive reinforcement and strategic planning. However, there is another branch of innovation in which innovators still require a great deal of training.
Innovate as a Team? Work on Your Psychological Safety!
To be able to use the full potential of innovation, psychological safety within teams and organisations is essential. Psychological safety is the shared belief that it is safe within the team for interpersonal risk taking. There is a direct relation between a psychological safe climate and performance of the team. (Edmondson 1999)
12 Tips for New Business Owners in the First 12 Months of Their Company’s Life
If you are starting a new business you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of decisions you need to make. You may wonder what secret tricks successful business owners used to ensure that their companies grew in the right direction. Here are twelve tips that you should use in your first twelve months in order to make sure that your company has the best chance to succeed.
Innovation: Knowing Where to Begin
Let me see if this situation sounds familiar: you’ve promised your boss that you’ll generate at least one percent growth over last year. You’ve been racking your brain with ideas about how to improve your product or develop a new offering or finding new efficiencies which will help your margins, but the few ideas that you’ve come up with haven’t had legs and pages keep coming off the calendar.
Employee Innovation Training – What Approach Works Best?
As organizations increasingly focus on building corporate cultures that are more open to new ideas, they are examining ways that they can engage a range of employees in innovative thinking and actions. In the past, the answer to this kind of effort was to run a challenge and pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.
How Innovation and Authenticity Complement Each Other in a Corporate Environment
Authenticity and innovation are two of today’s biggest corporate buzzwords. They are often considered as separate values, but in reality they have much in common and in this article we will examine the areas of overlap and potential leverage benefits.
Navigating the Make versus Buy Decision: A Crowd Sourced Check List
Product managers facing the make versus buy decision for their organization have a lot to consider. Biases abound. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins shares what was on the minds of senior product management leaders on this topic when they convened, recently. Their top 10 factors follow below.
A Compelling Value Proposition: The Missing Tool in Your Lean Startup Kit
Eric Reis first introduced the concept of Lean Startup in 2008. Today Lean Startup is deployed far beyond entrepreneurial circles and is taking root in large, complex organizations looking to improve their new product success rates – and in the process build lean cultures. This is very good news. Too often the processes corporations use in pursuit of innovation can actually erode their capability to innovate. Still, when applying the principles of “Build – Measure – Learn” to initiating Lean practices in corporations, there is room for improvement…and possibly even for a pivot.
How to Achieve More Effective Performance Appraisals
Roughly only half of all companies conduct annual performance reviews. Of the fifty percent of companies that do tend to provide consistent and reliable feedback to their employees. However, it can be awkward at times to tell someone on your staff that they aren't doing a good job or attempt to offer constructive criticism without sounding condescending. What are some ways to make a performance appraisal more effective and less awkward for yourself and the employee?
Shouting the Innovation Message (Finally): The Growing Importance of Internal Communication Planning
In the past year or so corporate innovation leaders have clearly taken an “ecosystem” perspective to their innovation activities. What this ultimately means is that they view all of their program’s activities as a connected whole and driving towards higher-level goals, often aligned with broader cultural change.
Knowing You, Knowing Me: Innovation as Transparency
What is happening in the world of innovation these days? In this article, innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on what he heard and learned at the Chief Innovation Officer Summit in New York this month. In short: do not underestimate the value of transparency that the practice brings.
Communicate to Innovate: Tips from the World of Improvisation
Effective communication is at the heart of innovation: harnessing insights from customers, partners and co-workers, sharing ideas, building upon points of view, advocating and gaining support for one’s innovations all require razor sharp communication. Interestingly enough, communicating effectively is a two-way street. The sender and receiver of information are both responsible for landing it appropriately, and both sides need to actively participate. Two simple, but powerful behaviors that can help increase the efficiency of communication are listening and declaring.