How to Innovate Your Business to Make It Climate Efficient
Climate efficiency is key for the future of everyone on this planet. With an issue of such magnitude, you may feel that individual actions cannot make a large impact. While your business by itself cannot solve global warming, the actions you take can inspire others and can have a much bigger impact than you may realize.
How to Create Innovation Confidence During the Great Resignation
Do your employees feel confident at work right now? Or are you worried that the Great Resignation may impact your company? Take these steps to make sure that your focus on innovation is the reason employees stay, and not the reason they leave.
Is Communication Sabotaging Your Ability to Innovate?
Avoid these four communications landmines as you navigate the stages of innovation.
Reflections on the Evolving Role of Innovation Professionals, Based on a Recent Panel Session
I recently participated in a panel session as part of a great conference organised by the Innov8rs group (thanks Hans!), with an amazing set of innovation leaders, including Gina O’Connor, John Metselaar, and Andrea Kates.
What is the Process for an Employee Innovation Challenge?
A growing trend over the past several years has been to host internal innovation challenges. Companies do this because they find it’s an excellent way to find solutions to long-standing problems, positively create culture (particularly in a remote workplace), and also to nurture the budding intrapreneurs who want to find career growth and new opportunities.
How Can Nonprofits Develop a Pilot Innovation Process that Works for Volunteers?
The innovation process (as variable as it can be) has a seemingly basic format no matter what your goal is: once you understand the problem, you identify some solutions to test. Those tests often occur in some limited, proof-of-concept format and are then rolled out for large-scale adoption. However, while testing out some sort of pilot scenario seems like a logical next step, many organizations aren’t sure how to do this, and it’s especially true for nonprofits where resources can be limited and every dollar must be accounted for.
An Innovation Competition is a Great Way to Influence Culture
In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Anna Steinhage, Dan Cable, and Duncan Wardley talk about the impact competition can have in a workplace. They described how hosting an internal challenge can generate creative results and inspire collaboration or it can create unethical behaviors and cutthroat rivalry.
Create Better Business Outcomes With Results-Only Innovation
Results-only innovation is an exploration of what is viable and pragmatic. This can help produce additional value for businesses and end users.
10 Tips for Dealing with Employee Recruitment and Retention
In September, McKinsey released a report describing the “Great Attrition,” a recent wave of cross-sector resignations we have witnessed throughout the world, primarily based on the exhaustion of employees due to the pandemic.
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.
The Six Pillars of Innovation Culture
Every year, IdeaScale asks our customers what their main priorities are for the coming year, and without fail one of the top two priorities is to create a culture of innovation. Every innovation thought leader, every organizational engagement specialist, every pundit or leader in transformation says that this is the secret to avoiding disruption.
The US Coast Guard and Rapid Adaptation: “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Textbook Hurricane’ or a ‘Standard Oil Spill'”
From recognizing innovators, to empowering your team at every level, to developing innovation outposts, the US Coast Guard are experts in innovation and idea management. Learn more in this podcast interview.
How Can Enterprises Think and Execute Like a Startup?
Around the world and across industries, enterprises are facing tremendous market upheaval. Transformation and disruption were the new normal well before the pandemic, but the coronavirus crisis accelerated certain trends toward innovation and digitization and led to the fundamental rewiring of old business models.
The Biggest Adaptations We Need to Make to Accommodate Climate Change
In 2020, for the first time ever, solar and wind made up the majority of the world’s new power generation. In 2021, the US alone committed to protect 30% of terrestrial and marine ecosystems by 2030. And as of Earth Day this year, more than 30% of the Fortune 500 have made commitments to a carbon-free future.
Whitepaper: Stimulating and Measuring Open and Cross Innovation
As two intermediaries from Hamburg that foster open and cross innovation processes, Science Scout (an initiative of Hamburg Innovation) and Cross Innovation Hub (Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft) joined forces to start a discussion around the stimulation and measurement of open and cross innovation processes.
Create a Team of Master Problem Solvers
Problem-solving is an essential skill as an innovator. If problems stump your employees, how can your organization ever innovate for customers? Luckily, problem-solving skills can be learned, and as a leader you can create a team of master problem solvers and innovators.
What is the New Model for Innovation Success?
In this series I’ve been critically examining the significant changes impacting the corporate innovation competency, which leads to how organisations drive future growth and impact.
Unleashing Virtual Creative Collaboration at The Sonophilia Foundation: What Can a Nonprofit Teach Us About Virtual Creative Collaboration
Does creativity suffer in our virtual world, or could working virtually actually lead to more collaborative environments, better ideation and heightened interaction?
How To Make Sure Your SMB Is Being Energy Efficient
Making your business environmentally sustainable does not mean reducing total material demand. Still, it does require more effective use of energy and resources and the mitigation of current waste streams.
What Are The Six Traits of Highly Innovative Organizations?
I love meeting innovators. You meet all types: some of them are blue sky thinkers, some of them are feasibility buffs, some of them are incredible networkers and presenters, and some of them are shy and fascinatingly deep thinkers.
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.
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.
Strategies that Promote Workplace Diversity and Make Your Business More Innovative
At IdeaScale, we’ve learned that diversity combined with equity and inclusion leads to more innovative thinking: businesses that are run by culturally diverse teams are more likely to develop new products, 45% more likely to grow market share, and more likely to have a 2X innovation revenue.
How McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index Relates to Innovation
McKinsey's Organizational Health Index (OHI) is an exhaustive assessment of an organization’s effectiveness and its management’s performance based on an organization-wide survey. It’s a tool that numerous public and private sector organizations have leveraged in order to benchmark their company’s health, align around core areas of improvement, and improve overall organizational performance.
What Are the Three C’s of Organizational Change?
I hadn’t thought much about health pathology innovation until we started to work with a statewide health pathology service in Australia. They provide pathology, forensic, and analytical services for hospitals and justice systems throughout their state.
Why Your Employees Are the Key to Recovery
In this article, we will look at how to identify and understand employee contributions, and learn how to work with idea generators, evaluators, and activators.
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!