The Secrets to Making Open Innovation Projects Work
Open innovation often requires global teams with national culture differences to work together, which presents some challenges. Here’s how to navigate them.
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.
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.
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.
Toward a Coherent and Self-Sustaining Innovation Framework
Innovation leaders today don’t have an easy job. Tasked with bringing Innovation to their organization, they often face a variety of interpretations of innovation throughout the organization, a lack of comprehensive understanding of what innovation really entails, and what it requires to truly embed innovation in a way that it sustains itself.
5 Management Mistakes You Don’t Realize You’re Making
The dictionary defines management as, “the process of dealing with or controlling things or people.” Sometimes, managers don’t understand why their team does not function cohesively. Below are five management mistakes managers don’t realize they’re making and tips to avoid these missteps.
Enhancing a Startup Culture in a Corporate Environment
There is little doubt that startups are dominating leadership discussion in many sectors of the economy, and have even become a source of admiration in popular culture. Whether driven by the hopes of “unicorn” valuations and lucrative exits or by the desire for more informal, collegial working environments, startups are more prevalent and attractive to existing and potential employees than ever. In fact, in a recent Accenture survey, only 15% of the class of 2014 would “prefer” to work for a mature, established organization.
Going Once, Going Twice, Going Three Times: Selling Your Idea
People cannot appreciate the value your idea offers if you fail to convey its relative advantage. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins shares a simple, good example of telling the right story at the right time to the right audience. Save this one for your clip file.
10 Reasons Corporate Culture Should Value Introverts
The corporate industry is defined by its powerful, charismatic leaders who articulate their company's innovative measures through bold and confident public announcements. If corporate culture can be likened to the backbone of a business, then the leaders are like the vocal box. They take the reins during meetings, deliver presentations and speak at a variety of different conventions and gatherings. These individuals become the face of their industry, and would surely be described as extroverts by most.
5 Great Ways to Ignite Your Team’s Energy
There are always periods when, as a manager, you might feel that your team members aren’t as productive as they could be, when their morale seems a little low or when they don’t seem as fully engaged with their work as you would like them to be. This can lead to them leaving the company if the situation becomes really bad, which costs the company both money and time spent either hiring a replacement or training a current employee to replace them.
6 Ways to Avoid Employee Burnout and Foster Innovation
According to a recent Gallup poll, around 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2014. Why are employees less engaged? Some of the blame is due to burnout at work. This burnout, characterized by severe mental and physical exhaustion, is leading to a lack of interest, reduced employee engagement and less work being accomplished. Most of the theories that have been devised in this regard suggest that the main cause is too much work and strain, but this might not be the case.
5 Traits that Make a Good Leader
Whether leaders are the captain of a team, the head of a household or the president of a company, their quest usually revolves around one thing: success. Quality leadership skills are often hard to measure on a daily basis, but their long-term effects are obvious and undeniable. Leaders are a lot of things and contain many traits, but there are five essential habits that, if practiced and pursued in an honest and consistent fashion, can help turn anyone into a leader and enable them to create their own success.
Taking a Leaf Out of Your Childhood in Your Professional Life
The way we develop as children can greatly impact the way in which we conduct ourselves as adults. Our early experiences and discoveries have a significant influence on the growth of various personality traits, such as leadership, the ability to work as part of a team and communication, which can have a big impact on our professional lives.
5 Ways to Improve Your Small Office Culture
Employers often seek cost effective, informal ways to enhance office culture. These strategies usually involve improving channels of communication in very basic, informal ways. But every company is not the same. Small companies have the advantage of creating a unique culture with no visible boundaries. So how can these organizations take advantage of this?
Try Using the Institutional Yes
When new ideas are voiced in your company is the typical response ‘yes but…’? If so, you’re really saying ‘No’ and closing the door on new ideas and open-minded employees. Paul Sloane says we could all learn a lesson from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by implementing the Institutional Yes.
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?
How Do You Measure Innovation Fitness?
The human body serves as the perfect metaphor for understanding the innovation challenge facing today's organizations. The body is built to adapt and respond to demands that are placed upon it. The greater the demand, the stronger the response. If you and your organization are going to thrive in this world you must build and keep your innovation muscles strong. We know that only the fittest survive.
Four Tools to Support Creativity and Innovation
There are four different types of innovation tools that we’ll describe here, including the design of the work place itself, practices that encourage and even enable effective collaboration, open innovation approach to connect inside innovation teams with outside partners and experts, and online tools that constitute the virtual work place. Separately and especially together, these can make a tremendous enhancement in the performance and the satisfaction of individuals, teams, and your entire organization.
Key Abilities of Effective Innovation Leaders
In the last chapter excerpt of The Innovation Formula we looked at the role of the business leader, including key strategies to communicate the purpose of innovation as well as taking on the responsibility for the learning of the entire organization as it pertains to innovation. Today, we'll look at the specific abilities required to organize and inspire innovation practices in your company.
Innovation Stakeholder Management: Gain Success From My Failure
In the second article on innovation stakeholder management, Anthony Ferrier focuses on two examples where he tried to generate broad support for innovation efforts with varying degrees of success. The lessons learned from these experiences provide insights for practitioners to successfully navigate stakeholder relations.
Embrace or Ignore Innovation Stakeholders: A Perspective on Corporate Antibodies
The accepted approach for Corporate Innovation leaders is to secure buy-in from all stakeholders, in order to secure success. This article (first in a series) argues against this approach, aiming for a more tempered effort, that seeks enough buy-in to push forward.
Outside / Inside Innovation: Combining Open Innovation with Employee Networks to Drive Success
As business leaders seek additional impact from Innovation Programs, new ways to leverage and scale existing resources are being explored. One approach is to link externally sourced ideas with networks of innovation-minded employees, to generate additional business impact.
Intrapreneurs, Catalysts, Champions, etc: The Changing Needs Within Innovation Development
In part three of this series Anthony Ferrier considers why organizations are seeking ways to identify, engage and drive their employees towards innovative activities, with titles such as Intrapreneaurs, Innovation Catalysts, Innovation Champions, etc.
Open Innovation: Lego and Bagels
Arguably, the principle of Open Innovation was utilised for the first time by Professor James Murray in 19th Century Oxford, England. In the time that has passed since then, this concept has become infinitely easier to implement thanks to the development of Innovation Management technology, however some companies are yet to wake up to its potential.