Boosting the Brain’s Creative Powers & Creating the Best Environment for Innovation
Creative thinking can be trained, and an environment for innovation can be purposefully built. Often plagued by a sense of urgency and pressure the modern office does not appear to be the ideal incubation opportunity for innovation – and yet there are strategies that can be used to defy the odds. So just how do we maximise the brain’s neurological capabilities in the midst of the busy contemporary working environment?
Mourning the Dead: Why You Should Have a Funeral after Killing Your Product
Pulling the plug on an in-flight project is hard. No one wants to be the person calling it quits, offending team members and admitting defeat. It is this mentality, however, that ends up sucking the life out of resources and budgets and setting the organization up for continued failure because the process is broken. How can you ensure only the right projects survive, wrong ones are killed early and lessons are celebrated after an appropriate mourning period? It’s going to take courage.
Innovation Networks in Action – A Case Study
In this fourth and final installment in this whitepaper series, we examine a live case study of where both innovation training and network development have been actively managed and sustained within Intuit, an IT organization based out of Silicon Valley.
Taking Innovation Training to the Next Level: Integration With Employee Networks
In the previous two whitepapers of this series we examined both the benefits of innovation training and areas of innovation skills that mid-to-junior level employees can be taught. In this installment we will address an important topic that is often missing from innovation training / education programs: How to build effective employee networks that support employees who have been trained with new innovation skills.
Soft is Hard to Change: The Challenge of aligning HR with Open Innovation
The fourth theme addressed by MOOI is the relation between Open Innovation and Human Resource Management. This article delves deeper into the few articles that have arisen on HR and OI in the academic and professional literatures and the lessons that can be drawn from these existing sources. It also shares some of the take aways from the MOOI-forum discussions on this particular topic focus.
Can Innovation Be Learnt?
The first whitepaper in this series focused on the benefits generated from training employees in innovation skills. A natural extension of that approach is to now focus on what innovation training really means to an organization. In other words, what actually is innovation training, and more importantly, can innovation be learnt?
Organizational Processes and Structures Supporting Open Innovation
Open innovation cannot be implemented in companies without the right organizational structure and processes supporting it. What are these organizational structures and processes that facilitate open innovation in companies? They determine the success of open innovation practices and, therefore, this theme clearly deserves more attention from managers. It is surprising that very few academic and professional articles have been written about this topic.
Ten Ways to Motivate Employees to be More Innovative
You love your employees, and, obviously, you think they do awesome work, or else you probably wouldn’t have hired them. Yet, do you ever find yourself wishing they could become a little bit more innovative? After all, the companies that are thriving in today’s competitive marketplace are also some of the most creative.
For all Departments: How can IP help HR, R&D, Sales & Marketing, Production, Finance & Purchase, CEO or Owner?
The patent database, with its 69 million documents is one of the richest resources of knowledge worldwide. The real key to its application is the refined ways to distil the relevant information. This article will highlight novel patent research, and its relevance for each department of a typical company.
Why Bother? The Value of Training Your Employees Around Innovation
Many successful innovation programs are extending their offerings to include training efforts for employees around the skills of innovation. This whitepaper (the first in a series of four) examines the benefits of such an approach for companies, innovation program leaders, and the employees who participate.
Pushing the Boundaries – Part 1: Understanding the Different “Faces” of Open Innovation
The MOOI-forum is in its 4th month now, focusing on Human Resources Management and Open Innovation as monthly theme. Every month, great discussions emerge on the forum. One topic that came back each month but remained somewhat in the background is what we could label “the different faces of open innovation”.
Mind the Gap! 5 Tips on How to Align Your Boss’ Perception of Innovation Maturity with Reality
The Fourth Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study identified challenges organizations face in speeding innovation to bring products to market. The biggest disconnect appears between middle management and executives as to where the organization is with their innovation maturity. Bridging this gap may be the most important thing you do to improve ROI.
Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 3
The optimal balancing of radical and incremental innovation is becoming a Key Success Factor in many industries. Organizational ambidexterity is the approach to achieve this. With a best-in-class ambidextrous set-up, firms can become innovation leader.
The Industrial Menopause and What to Do About It
It seems to be more or less a fact that the more mature a company is, the harder it is to produce something totally new that deviates substantially to what has been done earlier. In order to understand this phenomenon better Bengt Järrehult makes a comparison between human and industrial life, trying to elucidate the similarities and differences between the 2 worlds.
The Role of Top Management in Open Innovation
Implementing open innovation requires a shift in mindset and a change in culture. It requires individuals to be open for external ideas and to share knowledge. This is not the way innovation is managed traditionally. For individuals to behave in a way that fosters open innovation, support from the top management seems to be crucial. Is this really the case? Or are top executives too far away from the action when it comes to innovation and open innovation?
The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 12
Part twelve of the series finds the Idea Mill Program for collaborative innovation bearing fruit in authentic, unexpected ways. Do we have the courage to nurture the right environment in the knowledge—the faith—that good outcomes will result? That people will see the chance to realize their potential for leadership, and take it? Lastly, is it wise, ever, to order the vegetarian special menu for lunch at the local watering hole that features scenes from the hunt on its walls?
New Book from Stanford Professors on Scaling Up Excellence
Stanford University Professors Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao and Bob Sutton are addressing the “problem of more” in business with their new book, Scaling up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. Together, They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as provide strategy on eliminating destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.
Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Innovation Framework
Heidi Hattendorf, director of Innovation Development, Motorola Solutions takes a deep dive into how you can create an innovation framework at your company that will positively impact your business results and culture. The article describes seven steps that will help you implement an “inside out” approach to innovation at your company.
Tips For Quicker And More Innovative Analogies
In this article Dr. Stephen Sweid is sharing a few secrets of the analogy method that has been refined throughout the years. Suggested techniques render this method more user friendly, but also allow it to generate WOW type new ideas that are more compatible (for integration) and that work in the real world, e.g. in the market.
Implementing Open Innovation – Making It Stick
Open Innovation is becoming an essential part of an enterprise innovation strategy. Yet, so often, companies focus on getting a narrow set of tactical activities going without thinking through the strategic and organizational issues necessary to enable those activities to have the intended impact. This brief article covers a few of the implementation challenges faced by companies seeking to establish successful Open Innovation programs.
What Cleaning Your Closet Can Teach You About Complexity In The Workplace
Is your workplace cluttered? Not in the physical sense, but the figurative one. Do you have a bunch of old tasks and procedures taking up space without adding much value? Just like you have to dig through your closet every so often and get rid of questionable items that you once thought were good purchases, sometimes you have to assess the mental clutter that has built up in the workplace over time and recognize when policies have gone out of style. Tasks and rules that were once must-haves can build exponentially and increase complexity until employees have time for little else, like innovation.
Maturing Innovation Management One Step at a Time
The fall conference season is winding down and this year I've had the privilege of attending and speaking at some great innovation events, sharing the newly launched Innovation Management Maturity Model™. From regional PDMA meetings in Dallas and Atlanta, to the national PDMA PIM conference, the Optimizing Innovation conference in NYC, to the Planview Horizons Annual Customer Conference, it's been a brain-filling couple of months.
Brag about Your Failures
Many organizations in both the public and private sectors suffer from a corporate culture which is risk averse and fearful of failure. People are reluctant to try new things or even to suggest innovations. They remember old stories about colleagues being punished for experiments that failed. They have learnt that it is safest to keep a low profile and focus on standard operating procedures. Mean while the executive committee is desperately trying to think of ways to make the outfit more agile and innovative.
To Approach Change Differently, Change Your Approach
Why do so many corporations operate under the assumption that change initiatives must come from the top down? Mandated change is often out of touch with the everyday work of employees, so it’s met with resistance as they immediately anticipate the additional work these programs entail.