How to Create a Competitive Advantage Through Innovation
In the modern world of business, innovation is both an equalizer and a differentiator. It can give tiny startups an edge over global conglomerates and enable industry leaders to develop competitive advantages.
Top Five Challenges When Pitching a New Idea
Hardly an innovation event passes without mentioning how Kodak passed on the digital camera or how Blockbuster decided not to invest in streaming entertainment. But with the rapid rate of disruption, how do you ensure that great ideas can penetrate established organizations?
4 Ecosystem Strategies for Digitalization: Insights from the Swedish Mining Industry
Orchestrator, dominator, complementor, and protector: these are four ecosystem strategies toward digitalization. In this case study, we look at an equipment supplier wanting to participate in digitalization initiatives of its industrial customers, so it must configure an ecosystem strategy to align with multiple partners.
3 Unique Ways to Improve the Online Engagement of Your Business
There is nothing innovative about understanding the need to increase your online presence for a more successful marketing campaign. Where the innovation lies, however, is in the methods you use to engage your audience and drive traffic to your business’ website.
Why Don’t You Have Enough Innovation?
Nearly every company’s strategy these days is to grow through innovation, yet many fall short. We all know the standard reasons: innovation is hard, innovation is uncertain or innovation grinds against the gears of the operating organization. They are all more or less true, but they are also simplistic, not really guiding executives on how to actually get more innovation.
Five Causes of Innovation Blues
The key to innovation success is simple---innovation is nothing without exploration and exploitation.
The Importance of Senior Management Involvement for Innovation
Senior management is without a doubt a tough job. If you’re one of the few executives at the top of a large organization, there are likely hundreds of people; customers, employees, partners, and the list goes on; who are all looking for your attention regarding an endless sea of different topics and initiatives.
7 Mistakes to Avoid when Measuring Innovation
Measuring innovation is one of the most ambiguous tasks when engaging in innovation management. Because of the complex nature of innovation, finding the right metrics is far from being simple.
Top Innovation Trends in the Manufacturing and Energy Sector
In spite of the new explosive capacity for growth in both the energy and manufacturing sectors, “And only 24% of energy professionals consider their company to be ahead of the competition.” This disparity exists for a number of reasons, but often because a company’s innovation capabilities are not aligned with a repeatable innovation process. So what are the key inflection points for manufacturing and energy innovation?
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.
Running More Businesses at Once: Micro-Management vs. Macro-Management
As a business owner, finding the right management style will be one of the most important things you do. Your management technique should benefit your employees and most crucially, your business. Unfortunately, getting the balance right between micro-management and macro-management isn’t always easy.
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.
What’s the Difference Between Innovation and Knowledge Transfer
The internet was revolutionary in that it democratized the spread of information and ideas at a much faster rate than any other channel in. With the increased adoption of computing, we’ve also tracked the rise of “distributed knowledge” databases like Quora or Wikipedia. What is interesting is how powerful these specialized knowledge bases can prove to be in the context of innovation.
What the Ideation Platform Marketplace is Getting Wrong – the 7-Year Itch?
The ideation platform marketplace hasn’t really changed that much in the past 7 years or so. There was an early burst of innovative design and alignment with user needs, but at this point the sector seems to have stagnated in terms of how they add value. Call it reaching middle age, or perhaps they are having a 7-year itch?
Small Businesses can Overcome Financial Woes Through Innovation
Starting up a small business can be rough. Even if you possess near-infinite entrepreneurial spirit, chances are that you’ll run into some roadblocks along the way. Whether these obstacles are based in logistics of strategy and implementation of your business model, or even issues with the very products and services you offer, most of these problems can be solved with financial influx.
Have You Taken These 5 Necessary Steps to Increase Your Cybersecurity at Work?
Data breaches at large companies like Facebook and Delta Airlines have brought cybersecurity to the forefront of boardrooms across the world. Major corporations, the healthcare industry, and even the federal government are all monitoring network and digital infrastructures closely. However, many individuals have a hard time grasping how cybersecurity is essential to them.
What Contributes to Nonprofit Innovation
In an article by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the authors addressed a recent study from the Bridgespan Group that identified an innovation in the nonprofit sector. Although 80% of nonprofit leaders consider innovation an imperative, only 40% of those leaders consider their organization ready for innovation. SSIR went on to discuss the six characteristics that empower nonprofit innovation.
The 5 Best Management Apps for the Innovative Workplace
Businesses are always on the lookout for the next best idea that will help skyrocket them to success - but, once you've found this new idea, how do you put it into motion?
Learn to Lead Effectively and Innovate Your Business
Businesses must adapt and innovate to succeed in today's marketplace. However, innovation is not a part-time undertaking. It’s the foundation for effective organizational management and taps into the creative power of staff members.
5 Things that Are Slowing Most SMBs Down
On your path towards success, your business will encounter numerous bumps, however, some of these problems tend to hold your business more than others. Most of the time, the entrepreneurs behind these SMBs are first-timers, which means that they lack the necessary experience to recognize the gravity of the situation in the given moment.
Benefits of Gamification in Employee Online Training
Gamification in e-learning is not the same as playing online games: it essentially means adding game elements to non-game activities and processes; and even if actual games are involved, they will have a purpose and affect work positively.
6 Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Social Media Conversion System
Many people create social media profiles, and then simply leave them online, not particularly performing or contributing to business at all. Social media can be considered a necessary, if not a little meaningless, use of time and resources, but the people who think this way are often missing out on the amazing conversion rates that social media can offer when used properly.
Innovation Management: The Value of Seeing What You Have
If your job is to get your company, team, or community to innovate, you know how organizational forces can make it hard to even try something new. Visualizing the resources available is an effective first step in overcoming some of those organizational forces. Simply being able to see, and show, what you have allows you to make a compelling case for marshalling resources and even spark some initial interactions in that direction.
Five Digital Profiles of Innovators
Organizations need to invest in the cultivation of capacity for innovation and recognize innovators with varying talent and strengths.
If Every ‘New’ Idea is Derivative, Derive Them
Everything is derivative. Take advantage of that. “New” ideas are the next step in an extensive network of existing people and ideas. If we can get the data and reconstruct the network, we can analyze it and understand where branches of a network have the potential for innovation. Great ideas do not need to be created. They can be discovered.
Innovation in Cities – How Big Data Builds Smart Cities
More people are living in cities than ever before. More people are living closer together and changing weather and climate trends carry more threats to citizens. As cities become more digital, it is becoming easier to understand and predict the trends that are affecting the lives of the population.
Ensure Your Job Description Attracts the Talent You Need
Your job description is the first step to recruiting the perfect candidate but if it is so long-winded that potential candidates never get to the end of it, you will end up with dozens of unsuitable resumés to wade through, meaning a waste of your valuable time.
Why Aptitude Tests Are Important for Jobs in Innovation
Innovation is one of the main ways in which a business can differentiate itself from the competition. Innovation could take place by improving business processes or by entering new markets after upgrading current product and service offerings. To be innovative, companies need creative employees who have the ability to transform ideas into reality.