How to Break the 5 Habits That Hurt Ideation
Many companies find it hard to prioritize ideation. Here are five ways to break the pattern and gather a wealth of ideas for your organization.
How Does an Employee-Owned Fortune 500 Company Manage Their Innovation Lab?
Graybar is a Fortune 500 corporation and one of the largest employee-owned companies in North America. They are a leader in the distribution of communications and data networking products – even if you don’t know Graybar off the top of your head, you’ve probably been in contact with their products.
Why Your Employees Are the Key to Recovery
In this article, we will look at how to identify and understand employee contributions, and learn how to work with idea generators, evaluators, and activators.
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?
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.
Intrapreneurial Success: Leading Disruption, Managing Change
Embracing an intrapreneurial mindset, which intentionally disrupts things from the inside out and often from the bottom up, is a radical concept for companies that thrive on stability and predictability. However, if an enterprise is committed to developing its innovation capability through intrapreneurship, three groups of people must be mobilized to make it happen: leadership, stakeholders, and innovation support.
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.
The Catalyst Network: Expanding the Reach and Impact of your Innovation Team
To amplify your company's presence and scale your influence, innovation teams need to harness informal networks and not simply rely on formal structures to create a thriving innovation eco-system. Enter Innovation Catalysts: natural champions who are believers, idea generators, problem solvers, mentors and sponsors in your organization.
10 Skills You Need to Nurture in Your Innovation Group
Organizational innovation requires discipline. And like any other discipline, it requires monitoring and training to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of your capabilities. But what skills should you focus on building and how can you track your progress?
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?
Tech Employees on the Move
Talent Management provider DeepTalent has just released a new report showing to which companies employees of the biggest tech companies are going to.
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.
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.
Innovation Fitness: Measuring It to Maximize It
To gauge the innovation capabilities of an enterprise, it is helpful to apply a systematic method for assessing the quality of, and the relationship between the various and distinct dimensions that drive all functions of the enterprise. As with a sports team, simply having talent does not ensure success. It is the quality of the team work which ultimately elevates or hinders the level of their play.
Three Types of Networkers and the Roadblocks for Corporate Networking
As you determine how to build a networking culture within your organization, it’s important to understand how networking actually works. One of the most knowledgeable people on organizational networking and—how this supports innovation—is Rob Cross, a professor in the management department of University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.
Your ‘Innovative’ Workplace is not Enough
The term “innovative workplace culture” is increasingly clichéd, with little thought about what it means in practice. And yet a successful workplace culture is a business imperative for companies expected to lead the way in design and innovation in today’s experience economy.
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?
Building an Innovative Nonprofit: the Value of Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is often associated with start-ups and blue-chip companies who are trying to innovate, but it has the potential to reach far beyond those with seed money and infinite endowments. The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it is rooted in grassroots fundamentals—an environment that is ideal for non-profit businesses.
What your Definition of Innovation Says about Your Company
In a field centered around fresh, outside-the-box thinking, it is no wonder that there is such a broad range of definitions for the term innovation. Creating a clear-cut definition for the term is critical in shaping the culture of innovation at your organization and will help you determine which resources to allocate to your program.
The Changing Face of Corporate Intrapreneurship
In early September 85 smart people gathered for two days at the Pfizer conference center in New York City to talk about their practical experience in identifying, engaging, driving value from and (at times) failing with the most innovative employees in their respective businesses. The 2016 Corporate Intrapreneur Summit was 100% on point in targeting key areas of interest around how intrapreneurs in a corporate setting.
Mad Scientists and Creativity Labs
Managing solitary and collaborative innovation: All innovation is based on creative ideas which are generated and developed by passionate people working alone and with others. Both solitary and collaborative work are important to the effective development of innovation in organizations. The key for leaders is to effectively promote both.