Innovation Programs & Entrepreneurship: Busting Myths
A lot of companies aspire to implement successful innovation programs but the programs fail surrounded by certain myths. A seasoned entrepreneur has bust those myths in the article based on his personal experience.
7 Lessons You Can Learn from Your Previous Business Mistakes
We’ve heard it time and time again – 90% of startups fail in the first five years of operating. Bad financial decisions, a poorly designed business model, a wrong product for the market, financial mismanagement, and bad timing are just some of the most commonly cited reasons why some businesses never manage to pass the five-year threshold.
3 Ways How DRaaS Can Help to Save Your Business
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a category of cloud computing designed to protect applications and data against natural and human disasters. It ensures that service disruption of a business is kept to a minimum by enabling a full recovery through the cloud. Most often it is handled by a third-party provider and managed by your internal IT personnel, removing some workload from your IT professionals and giving them peace of mind.
Are you Called to be an Innovation Leader?
If you want to be innovative, you need to be a leader. No individual or organization has become an innovative one by copying the actions of their competitors or peers. That may seem obvious, but evidence shows that most people fail to realize this critical fact.
The Innovation F-word
Fail fast. Fail cheap. Fail early. Go out to fail. We have all heard these words numerous times in connection to innovation and how to create radical innovation, the ultimate dream for all of us involved in the field. In fact the f-word is used so frequently in connection to innovation that it is about to become yet another meaningless slogan. Why is failure so hard? In this blog post Susanna Bill takes failure out of slogans and into a human orientated perspective.
Five Ways to Commit Innovation Suicide
Customers change. Competitors change. Technology changes. If you don’t do anything, new and competitive products catch up and overtake your products and services quickly. A study by A.D. Little has shown that the life cycle of products has decreased by factor 4 the last fifty years. So innovation is essential. But it is time consuming. It demands a lot of resources. And a positive outcome is very uncertain. In this blog Gijs van Wulfen offers a helping hand by identifying five common mistakes to avoid.
A Lesson in Innovation – Why did the Segway Fail?
The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen. It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity. Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity. In this article Paul Sloane takes a look at what lessons to be learned from the failure.
10 Tips for Successful Innovation Teams
Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. This article provides a collection of ten tips that serve as a talent management roadmap for growth companies in search of high-performance teams that deliver.
Innovation: Should you Roll the Dice?
Paul Sloane uses a gambling analogy to show how uncertain innovation is and why senior management isn't likely to approve a new idea after several failures in a row.
A New Approach to Manage Disruptive Innovation in an Environment of High Uncertainty
Existing methods for the management of innovation projects have a low probability of success in the development of radical or disruptive innovations. A new spiral approach has been developed that provides the balance of flexibility and control needed for a repeatable and successful approach to disruptive innovation.
Resilience Rules
Western societies and the systems we depend on to make them function are becoming ever more complex. As a result, they are also becoming more vulnerable to catastrophic, systemic failure. As individuals, communities and societies we may, at the same time, be becoming less able to cope with such events as we lose basic skills, families are more scattered and communities less connected.
Why do Most Products Fail? 3 Techniques to Leverage Hidden Needs
Many managers want their organizations to develop breakthrough products and ask their R&D departments to come up with the equivalent of the iPod or iPhone. Unfortunately, the reality is that product failure is more common than success. So what are the reasons for product failure and what steps can companies take to avoid it?
35 Ways to Cultivate Innovation and Organizational Learning
Innovation and organizational learning are inextricably connected. A company must learn from its mistakes and cultivate multiple pathways for recognizing and leveraging the best ideas effectively, whether those ideas come from inside or outside of the organization, says Jim Clemmer. Here are 35 ways to sharpen your organizational "innovation radar," to accelerate learning cycles and recognize and capitalize on opportunities faster.
4 Key Success Factors That Can Enable a Higher Return on Innovation
In a slow or no-growth environment, we know successful innovation is absolutely essential for companies to establish and maintain a competitive advantage. While that may be yesterday’s news, achieving it is hard work. How can you achieve high value from your innovation initiatives? In this article Adi Alon discusses four key success factors that can help you get a higher return on innovation.
What Artists can Teach Creative Thinkers
Artists are innately creative, of course. That's why the rest of us, who are seeking to expand our creative powers, can learn much from them. Danielle Feliciano highlights three characteristics that we can borrow from artists to spur our own creative muse.
Can we Dent the Universe, Too? 6 tips for Innovation Inspired by Steve Jobs
Jobs had a spectacular innovation compass; some of its directions can guide our inner innovators too, according to Andrew Sherman.
In Praise of Bad Ideas
We’ve all been there; a brainstorming session, presentation, meeting or other group event when somebody blurts out what is clearly the worst idea in the world. But bad ideas can be good. Harvey Briggs explores why.
How Improvisational Techniques can Benefit Innovators
The techniques of improvisational performance can be applied in helpful ways to any situation where people are collaborating to innovate or build something, says improv expert Kat Koppett.
The Top 6 Predictors of Creative Performance in the Workplace
Is it possible to accurately predict if a person will be an effective creative thinker at work? After conducting rigorous tests, one Australian innovation firm says definitely yes.
Asking the Important Questions: A Guide to Design Thinking And a Better Way to Serve Customers
Design thinking should be a way of life for senior managers. Melba Kurman spoke to Sara Beckman, design and innovation expert at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, about how to apply design thinking to the innovation process.
Managing Innovation Through the Stress Points
Building innovation management as a discipline requires us to take a closer look at the hurdles innovative firms face as they develop new products, services and partnerships but also at how those firms integrate the learnings from making tough choices. Andrew Gaule takes a look at building innovation culture as we manage through the stress points.
Innovation Lessons from Apple – Learn From a Modern Day Leader
In the face of increasing shifts in the world economy, and particularly increased competition across markets and company offerings, it would appear that one of the latest trends in instinctive strategic advice for companies is to become “more innovative!” Yet being more innovative is not necessarily easy. Learn more in this article by IMD professor Bill Fischer.
Embrace Mistakes as a Source of Learning and Invention
How does your company deal with mistakes? If continuous learning from your employees, innovation and even breakthrough innovation are important to you, it is critical you embrace mistakes, at least as sources for learning and invention.
15 Foundations for Facilitating Creativity in the Workplace
Here are lessons learned from 12 years of creative facilitation in business, from creativity expert Michelle James.
10 Steps for Boosting your Firm’s Innovation
Here are 10 steps you can take to turn your company into an innovation leader that races forwardswith new products, services and improved processes while your competitors remain far behind with outdated products, limited services and inefficient processes.
Top 10 Reasons for Open Innovation Failure
A recent 15inno Twitter Chat made me ponder on the worst and most common mistakes that companies do on open innovation. Here comes a list of my thoughts – still work in progress.
Fundamental Principles for Innovation – What’s Your Opinion?
In this article, Heinz Essman, contributing editor from South Africa, introduces a set of proposed fundamental principles for innovation. It is indeed a proposal and we are very interested in hearing your views on this. Welcome to read and then visit the InnovationManagementForum.com to share your views and discuss with like-minded.
Innovation and Change: What are you afraid of?
Fear of change can make people resist the best of ideas. Keep this in mind when you innovate!