Zen vs. Zoom: Is Person-to-Person Interaction Better for Innovation?
The author draws upon the theory of “emptiness” and other principles of Zen Buddhism to evaluate the desirability of remote vs. person-to-person interaction during the course of innovation, especially new idea development. This evaluation is pursued within the context of three related idea process parameters: interdependence, intuition and intensity. An in-person work environment is recommended for the intense phases of new idea processing.
How Online Whiteboards Create Actionable Results for Businesses
To run a successful business, you must be able to complete individual and shared tasks regularly and reliably. One of the most significant components to achieving this is making sure you create actionable results in your meetings, conversations, and workflow.
How to Improve Return on Investment With a New Project Management Approach
Too often, leaders label projects as successes or failures based on budget and schedule expectations. Although time and cost are critical factors, they ignore whether the project delivered the expected benefits.
Let’s Settle the Debate – Innovation Both Is & Is Not Everyone’s Job
Is ‘innovation’ everyone’s job – as so many claim it is? Or is it not everyone’s job – as the counterargument goes? The reality is not quite so simple. Dive in as we examine the three cases of significance here – two in which innovation is everyone’s job, and one in which it isn’t.
Breaking the Innovation Stereotypes: The Case of Curry Express
We often hear about the concept of innovation and its importance in enhancing the competitiveness of an organization---however, the excessive use of this term has distorted its true meaning and content.
The Secrets to Making Open Innovation Projects Work
Open innovation often requires global teams with national culture differences to work together, which presents some challenges. Here’s how to navigate them.
How to Ensure Crowdsourcing Works for Product Innovation
Many enterprise organizations use crowdsourcing to find ideas in their blind spots - but how do you launch your first crowdsourcing challenge, and what sorts of questions do you ask? IdeaScale Crowd is hosting a webinar for first-time crowdsourcing innovators who want to engage a large group of collaborators in solving their problems.
One Certainty in These Uncertain Times: Innovate Through Ecosystems, or Miss the Opportunity to Radically Transform Your Innovation Strategy
Hardly no one will regret 2020, it seems. Yet, 2021 ahead is hard to predict. There are hopeful signs that pave the way for a better, stronger future, but as we have now the experience, our world can go upside down almost overnight.
Increase Your Innovation Reputation and Velocity with an Innovation Evangelist
Building upon my popular article Rise of the Evangelist, I wanted to create an article for the global innovation community focused specifically on the importance of the innovation evangelist role.
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.
The Key to Success In 2021: Building a Creative and Innovative Culture
In this article by Jeff DeGraff, he presents the four types of innovative cultures and four best practices for building a culture of innovation.
TASC: A Practitioner’s Tool for Better Results in Open Innovation
Despite its popularity as a way to promote innovations, organizations face challenges in their open innovation (OI) initiatives. As knowledge flows are vital for the success of OI initiatives, organizations should identify right partners in their open innovation implementations. This article suggests TASC as a tool that can be used by practitioners for better results.
What Can We Learn from NASA About Crowdsourcing in a Pandemic?
When COVID-19 shut down the United States in 2020, everyone wanted to be a part of the solution. At NASA, the entire NASA workforce expressed their desire to help the nation combat the virus – even though most of their employees were asked to work from home.
What is a Virtual Innovation Lab?
The Virginia Department of Transportation created their own Virtual Innovation Lab, where they collaborate to solve problems related to remote work, engineering topics, safety, and more with the help of their entire distributed workforce. Learn more in this December 15th webinar!
How Does Diversity and Inclusion Impact Innovation?
Nearly all executives believe the long-term success of their business depends on the flow, testing, and development of new ideas. One of the problems is the old belief in the “creative genius” – that creativity and innovation belongs to a talented few and not to everyone.
Why Bother with User Innovation?
Users are a hidden ‘front end’ of innovation, highly motivated, prepared to experiment and tolerant of things not working right first time. So it makes sense to try and bring this perspective to bear.
Customer-Centric Innovation? Sure, But With Which Customers?
Today, putting customers at the heart of innovation is a no-brainer for most business managers. However, should the innovation process involve all customers or only specific segments? In this article we explore the hurdles of these initiatives and propose a method to select the most relevant customers with whom to innovate.
When Discovering Customer Needs, How Do You Get Beyond Survey Bias?
When Yamaha conducts research to drive product development, they've found opportunities in previously unexplored areas of incremental change. Learn more in this podcast interview.
Digital Tools and the Future of Remote Work
Until recently, remote work was somewhat of a rarity, and, at very least, something most people were unfamiliar with. One of the few COVID-19 silver linings, however, was that many companies were forced to have their employees work remotely due to stay-at-home orders. This meant more time with families, less time in transit, and, for a lot, a surprising sense of comfort at "the workplace."
Using Innovation to Improve Your McKinsey Organizational Health Index Score
2020 proved just how important our relationships to banks and credit unions are as they worked to rapidly respond to the changing financial needs of their customers.
Remote Innovation – A Method to use over Zoom
Paul Sloane discusses ways to collaborate remotely over Zoom, drawing on inspiration from the musical duo The Postal Service, in this new article.
Developing High Performance Leadership
Organizational knowledge cannot merely be described as the sum of individual knowledge, but as a systematic combination based on social interactions shared among organizational members.
Let Customers Help You Innovate During COVID
In this article, we'll look at three ways to engage customers and create products they want to buy right now.
Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!
In a time when uncertainty reigns, the fear of being disrupted can brutally hurt any business. Responsible leaders who dare to anticipate disruption and take steps to self-inflict it to their organization in a smart and controlled way are best positioned for the future.
7 Incentives to Increase Participation in a Crowdsourced Innovation Program
Every year, one question tops all the others that our customers might bring to us: how do I increase engagement in my innovation community? We see this question even in the most robust and activated innovation programs.
The World has Changed: Is Your Organization Ready?
The COVID-19 epidemic has had a tremendous effect on many aspects of our lives and resulted in a significant change in the workforce, and on the very way that individuals and organizations work. Suddenly, without warning, it seems that the entire business world shifted to Zoom and its competitors in a day, since it offered a concrete solution to the challenges raised by the current crisis.
How to Build Knowledge-Based Companies?
Knowledge management improves organizational processes through a variety of different practices, and enhances learning, which can increase both follower engagement and personal development. This article presents the two key steps of successful knowledge management that can be implemented by company executives.
The Three Challenges of Crowdsourced Innovation
You have a problem to solve, and we have the crowd. IdeaScale has recently acquired Betterific, a crowdsourcing platform that engages a community of 18,000+ creative problem solvers, design thinkers, and ideators to help you come up with your next big idea. Learn more about how you can tap into this innovative community.