Is There Value in an Innovation Program for Your Company?
In my last article I wrote about the influences and themes that I see changing how large, mature and (often) incumbent organisations drive innovative growth and impact. In short, the innovation development professionals are (ironically) being disrupted.
The Essential Skills to Teach Intrapreneurs
At JR Simplot, a new cross-functional innovation initiative recently formed looking for ideas that would help optimize company efficiency, improve training programs, and more. And when they built this team, they realized that a big part of launching an innovation initiative was education. Learn more in this podcast.
How Remote Working Jumped the Queue in the Future of Work
The COVID-19 situation isn’t just affecting the way businesses work, it’s shaping discussions about how they will in future, too. Recent global events have affected businesses in unimaginable ways, testing them in a manner not seen in several generations. However, present circumstances have also fast-forwarded several conversations surrounding the future of work.
Why You Should Embrace Creativity Within Your Culture
As a company grows, its creativity typically tends to decrease. What can be done to prevent a decrease in creativity within an organization?
It Works! The ‘Results Equation’
We are moved by goals. The resolve to reach the finish line pushes us forward: at work, in life. Why then do we keep idea management initiatives alive when it’s not clear what results they deliver (if any)? And how often have we yearned for a formula that definitely makes it all happen?
Sitting on Untapped Potential – The Power of Your Organisation’s Collective Intelligence
In the autumn of 1906, 85-year-old Sir Francis Galton made a fascinating discovery on the judgment power of crowds: The accuracy of groups is far greater than of individuals. It’s a well-known story yet worth recapping. Surprisingly, the central character is a fat ox.
What Is An Employee Innovation Network, And Why Should You Care?
As Innovation Program leaders look to expand their scope and influence across complex, global organizations, they are turning to the development of Employee Innovation Networks. This article examines what these networks can look like, and provides some high level overview of the value that they can generate.
How to Build a High Performance Innovation Culture
Innovation is the mantra in leadership these days. Isolated innovation efforts abound. Still, most likely, your innovation program will fail, as many do. Not because you’re incapable of good innovation or because you’re lacking a mandate, but because you’ve probably overlooked some fundamental pre-requisites. Don’t worry, we have good news.
In Pursuit of “Actionable” Ideas
Engagement matters on the front end of innovation. Tangible results matter on the back end. Organizations that pursue the practice of collaborative innovation seek, ultimately, actionable ideas: ideas whose implementation yields benefits.
Should you Engage with Your Company Beyond your Job Description?
Benefits abound when organizations fully engage their employees. Deeply involved employees are more efficient—working longer hours and going beyond what is asked— and, organization-wide, engaged personnel directly impact financial results. A Towers Perrin study found a 6% higher profit margin in companies with engaged staff, while Gallup reported higher employee engagement scores positively correlate with increased earnings per share.
Leadership’s Influence Company’s Culture
A company will always follow its leaders, but what influence do they play on the company culture?
Employees Need Direction and Encouragement to Foster Profitable Entrepreneurial Ideas
As the global economy continues its gradual recovery, companies want entrepreneurial ideas that spur growth. Oftentimes though we see a gap between what entrepreneurially-minded employees think about and what the companies that employ them want.
Company Culture: A Driving Force For Innovation
Real innovation will starts with your company culture. Your shared values will help your business grow while stale company culture can sink you entirely. Your company culture can change in subtle ways over time but there are many ways to keep your infrastructure on task and in line with your overall mission. Simply stated, a good company culture drives innovation.
Taking Innovation Training to the Next Level: Integration With Employee Networks
In the previous two whitepapers of this series we examined both the benefits of innovation training and areas of innovation skills that mid-to-junior level employees can be taught. In this installment we will address an important topic that is often missing from innovation training / education programs: How to build effective employee networks that support employees who have been trained with new innovation skills.
Ten Ways to Motivate Employees to be More Innovative
You love your employees, and, obviously, you think they do awesome work, or else you probably wouldn’t have hired them. Yet, do you ever find yourself wishing they could become a little bit more innovative? After all, the companies that are thriving in today’s competitive marketplace are also some of the most creative.
Why Bother? The Value of Training Your Employees Around Innovation
Many successful innovation programs are extending their offerings to include training efforts for employees around the skills of innovation. This whitepaper (the first in a series of four) examines the benefits of such an approach for companies, innovation program leaders, and the employees who participate.
Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Innovation Framework
Heidi Hattendorf, director of Innovation Development, Motorola Solutions takes a deep dive into how you can create an innovation framework at your company that will positively impact your business results and culture. The article describes seven steps that will help you implement an “inside out” approach to innovation at your company.
Innovation: An Outside-In Approach
Every organization wants to be thought of as “innovative” and although cliché, there is something said about thinking outside of the box to help you get there. However, simply asking your employees to think outside of the box at your next internal planning session or brainstorm meeting may not be enough to get to those game-changing ideas. To get unique solutions, you need to look at things in new light. The following seven strategies are tactics that will help you take an outside-in approach to innovation, to help you come up with unexpected, richer solutions.
Internal Communications, Meet Collaborative Innovation
Groups handling internal communications within their organizations experiment with engaging employees through virtual forums. These forums create space for collaboration. In time, meaningful collaboration foments a culture of innovation. How might internal communications advance this culture? How might they secure deeper engagement? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores how securing deeper commitment between organization and employee opens the door to deeper engagement.
Making the Right Idea Investment Choices- Idea Evaluation at Scale
Previous articles in this series focusing on collaborative enterprise innovation have covered topics such as the benefits of software platforms in enterprise innovation, internal communications, increasing engagement and driving collaboration. In this article we share insights on evaluating large numbers of ideas generated as part of enterprise programs.
How to Assess an Innovation Training Program
As innovation becomes an important skill set, large organizations will seek to obtain training for their employees. We stand on the brink of an innovation training “land rush” with few rules and little information to identify the best programs. Evaluating an innovation training program is critical. Assess programs based on their depth, the experience of the trainers, the referenced body of knowledge and the inclusion of practical examples and hands-on exercises. Ignore certifications, because no standard exists.
The Innovative Employee: Traits, Knowledge and Company Culture
How can a companies’ ability to innovate be improved?All innovation activity can be traced back to the behavior of employees. That makes the employee the center point of attention, if you want to improve your innovation ability. This article is built around the question: Which personal abilities and traits as well as organizational culture enable an employee to be innovative?
The Professional Facilitator as Innovation Catalyst
“Innovate or die,” heralds the Digital Age. The wise leader, mindful of the limits of the latter, embraces the practice of collaborative innovation as a way for their organization to pursue the former. Organizations, too, have professional facilitators on staff and on call. Working as an adjunct to the human resources function, they have remained largely absent from the dialogue around the practice. Innovation happens elsewhere.
Driving Collaboration – Diverse Opinion is the Key to Innovation
We know the value of collaboration in traditional innovation activities, but systemizing the process helps to increase the diversity of opinion available early on in the process. In this article we share insights on driving collaboration between your employees.
Top Six Components of a Creative Climate
Are you thinking about ways to transform your workplace into an environment more conducive to innovation? This article takes a closer look at six components of creative climates that have shown to be significant at facilitating creativity according to new research.
How to Build a Lean High Performance Innovation Team
The world we live in is changing at a dizzying rate and sectors including energy, technology, entertainment, communications, finance, sports, manufacturing and engineering are all experiencing shifts on a seismic scale. Many of the innovative advances of the past ten years, from smart phones to digital cameras have become commoditised and creativity has become the currency of success. In this article author Matthew Griffin shows how large and small organisations alike can build lean, agile, high performance innovations teams and bridge any shift successfully.
How to Increase Engagement in Enterprise Innovation and Develop a Sustainable Program
Maintaining and building high-quality engagement over time should be the focus of all innovation managers as they strive to develop sustainable enterprise programs. This article shares key activities you can undertake in order to boost engagement with your program.
The Secret of Innovative Companies: It Isn’t R&D
In rejecting the limiting belief that innovation is R&D’s job alone, leaders of highly innovative companies work hard to instill “innovation is everyone’s job” as a guiding organizational mission. In this article, co-creators of Innovator’s Accelerator, Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen share insights and examples to follow in order to ensure innovation starts at the top and reaches the bottom of your organization.