How to Turn a Failure into a Wild Success
After six months of hard work, we were sitting together on a warm spring afternoon enjoying a beer in one of Melbourne’s new hipster bars. We had learned a lot, traveled all over Australia and met amazingly passionate people. We’d put together a lean startup with a focus to test a simple business idea and we’d heard countless times how much our tools were needed. There was only one problem. We had failed.
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.
Brand Relevancy: Brainstorming Your Way to Business Innovation and Growth
Running a business is tough, no matter what industry you're in. Retaining loyal customers and remaining relevant are some of the biggest challenges faced by today's business owners. Fortunately, you're not alone and your company is not the first to navigate these waters.
Making Work Fun to Improve Culture and Engagement
For HR and business managers, it can be challenging to create a productive workplace where employees are motivated to be engaged. It may be time to make work fun again with a variety of practices and tools that are implemented. To transform the environment of your workplace and create a positive environment. Here are a few simple changes that can benefit the business.
How Innovation Develops Among Individuals in Niche Social Networks
In the current digital arena, social networks have touched the lives of almost every human being on earth, allowing us to share life's novelties with friends and loved ones. However, social networks are not restricted to sharing and commenting on pictures, but giving rise to innovation among individuals to help make our world a better place.
China on the Way to Becoming a Global Innovator
As part of the transformation of the Chinese economy, attested by many recent news, China is fast transitioning from low cost manufacturing to a higher value innovation-led economy. This article looks at this momentous transition.
The Best Tools to Derisk Innovation
At the start of the twenty first century the innovation buzz has become deafening. It commands the attention of everything - from the popular media to scientific journals. Innovation is claimed to be the driver of economies and the competitive edge of companies. With innovation being the core of many new management styles, one question still remains for the enthusiastic manager; what are the concrete tools for my employees to build our revolutionary innovations?
Opportunities for Product Management to Embrace Collaborative Innovation
What is top of mind in the world of product management? What does the product manager seek? How might the practice of collaborative innovation help the product manager achieve their goals? The innovation architect Doug Collins shares his perspective on these questions based on his recent participation in a product management summit.
Should You Invest in Workplace Training?
‘Workplace training’: two words which are liable to send shivers down every manager’s spine. Not because they’re against their employees learning, of course not; but that it eats up hours upon hours of time and can cost a lot of money. Yet there’s no disputing the benefits of workplace training in terms of staff retention, filling skills gaps, improved productivity and competitive edge.
10 Ways to Reduce the Innovation Failure Rate
You are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment, but most of the time innovation fails. Innovation process-expert Robert Cooper shows that of every seven new product/service projects, about four enter development, 1.5 are launched, and only one succeeds. Innovation is so difficult to master, indeed. I love to share with you five reasons why innovation goes wrong and give you ten ways to reduce your failure rate of innovation.
The True Value of Your Ideas
The mantra of ideas being worthless can be heard from all corners of the globe. Venture capitalists back founders and not ideas. In 2009, the entrepreneur and author Seth Godin got the nine of his alternate MBA students to come up with 111 ideas each to create 999 business concepts (Godin 2009). The point? To prove that “Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution.” But is this correct? Your gut feeling demands that your best insights are worth more than nothing, right? Right.
Collaborative Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing: Just Getting Started
Advanced manufacturers—people who make “things”—face the same challenges in the Digital Age as their counterparts that traffic wholly in bits and bytes. Relentless immediacy. Increased transparency. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on the results from a survey that the analyst firm Frost & Sullivan conducted as part of the Manufacturing Leadership Council. What are the more advanced of the advanced manufacturing thinking these days about the practice of collaborative innovation? Are they on track?
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.
The New Form of Startup Scaling
For most startups, the biggest question haunting them today is not money but scale. According to Forbes magazine, the number one cause of startup death is premature scaling (Furr 2011). So the question on every entrepreneurs’ lips is: How quickly and when to scale? But before you answers that, I’d like to ask you why no-one seems to be concerned with the even bigger question, what is scaling all about? And what is so different now that small groups of people can create billion dollar businesses on their own?
Three Megatrends that will Affect Everybody’s Business
The future is hard to predict and a lot of “experts” regularly get it wrong. However, there are some facts so important and trends so inevitable that leaders would be ill-advised to ignore and not try to anticipate. Here are three of many future megatrends that will not necessarily determine what will happen, but will most likely have a big impact on everybody’s business in the coming years to decades.
Top 5 Tips for Outsourcing Your Learning and Development
Although a lot of companies would undoubtedly prefer to keep all of their operations in-house, this sometimes isn’t realistic. Whether you are suffering from budget or other resource restrictions, lack of personnel or a general lack of time to do a high-quality job, many other organisations are available to handle things on your behalf.
Don’t Be Afraid of Upsetting People – A Negative Reaction is Better than no Reaction
South Park is a highly successful cartoon sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central TV network. The show was launched in 1997 and quickly became notorious for its rude language, minimalist characters and black, surreal satire. It was aimed at an adult audience and poked fun at a wide range of topical or taboo subjects. South Park has received many accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards. It is the third longest-running cartoon series in the U.S. behind The Simpsons and Arthur. Yet it was very nearly cancelled when initial tests showed that most people did not like it.
Tips to Achieve an Innovative and Differentiated Startup Project
This is the era of rapid changes and disruptive innovations, and no startup, irrespective of size or industry, should be launched without a high degree of innovation and differentiation. This article is about the why, what, and the how— the systematic way to achieve this, based on the long international experience of the author, Dr. Stephen M. Sweid.
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?
5 Ways To Prepare Your Business For The Future
Thanks largely to rapidly expanding technologies, planning for the future is more important than ever in business. With thorough preparation and some strategic initiative, your business can position itself to take advantage of some of the inevitable changes that are on the horizon for companies across all industries. Here are five ways to get started.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Innovation
Innovation has become a bit of a business buzzword. Every CEO and CIO worth their salt wants to be seen to be on the forefront, bringing new products and services to a market. However, it doesn’t always go to plan, and rushing in to things head first without the proper due diligence can land a company in hot water.
How Far Can Crowdsourcing Go?
The origins of ‘crowdsourcing’ lie very much in the business world. The term is widely accepted to have been coined by Wired magazine in 2006, in an article analysing how businesses were beginning to outsource tasks, usually handled by an individual to a larger number of people, in the expectation it would gain faster results for a cheaper price. Since then, business use of crowdsourcing techniques has become more established. Crowdfunding, for example, has become a common way of raising funds, while Spigit Engage customers provide a great example of how businesses are applying crowdsourcing to the innovation process.
The Unexpected Impact of Modern Innovations
Today’s pace of life can make you feel like you are strapped to the top of a rocket. With more and more screaming for your attention, we barely have time to send that long forgotten birthday card, let alone to sit down and think about the long-term effects of our innovations. But what if your latest and greatest innovation turned out to damage the lives of millions instead of improve them as planed? What if your proudest moment was also your most heinous?
Innovation Enablers
They say variety is “the spice of life” – but in our working lives, it’s the spice, ingredients and a good portion of the kitchen equipment too. In striving to build comprehensive and sustainable enterprise innovation programs however, too often I see companies then ignoring the need for diversity – both in the reach and composition of their programmes. We are long past the days where a company’s growth can be sustained with innovation from a few solitary individuals in a lab or conference room. Innovation nowadays needs to be a singular mindset across the entire company – with executives not just asking, but instead requiring collaborative input from across the organisation as they look to solve the strategic and tactical problems that stand in the way of progress.