Innovation partnerships: How to avoid Dante’s Inferno
Over the years, I have seen unsuccessful innovation partnerships that seemed to have come straight from Dante's Inferno.
To Re-invent Your Company, Reinvent Yourself
Companies are increasingly recognizing that today’s turbulent times require nothing short of continual reinvention. Weathering today’s storm isn’t enough. Companies need to develop repeatable processes that regularly renew their firms before the next crisis hits. This kind of renewal must begin with the leaders themselves.
People: The ‘raw materials’ of innovation
You can pick your raw materials for product you make but your innovation raw materials are your people. Understanding your people will improve your chance of innovation success.
What is an Innovation Culture?
Creating an innovation culture requires new leadership skills, new people skills, new processes, and a focus on opportunity.
3 key issues that can kill your innovation initiatives
Culture, Communication and Collaboration are the 3 C's that form the "soft-side" foundation of successful innovation. Without understanding your personnel "raw material" for innovation, the process may be difficult if not impossible to execute successfully.
What’s driving you to reinvent?
While large organizations innovate, smaller ones often reinvent because they have different drivers for change.
How to Recognize Six Systemic Failures of Innovation
There are six potential types of failure within innovation systems. Are all of yours healthy?
Effective Idea Selection is Critical to Systematic Innovation
In many companies there is no obvious strategy for selecting or even evaluating ideas. According to author Robert B. Tucker, a clear set of criteria for screening ideas and having properly-trained people on the selection team is critical to systematic innovation.
Innovation check-up: Is your company dying from root rot?
You need to analyze your organization and culture to assess its innovation capacity with the same intensity as you do the rest of your business, warns Carol Franczek. Otherwise, you may find your firm suffering from the symptoms of "root rot."
How do you Build and Sustain a Culture and Climate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship?
The fifth major issue to be tackled by our distinguished panel of innovation practitioners is innovation culture, specifically: How do you build and sustain a culture and climate for innovation and entrepreneurship, and how do you encourage "smart risk taking" and drive out fear of failure?
10 Rules for Creative Teams
Under the right circumstances, a team can be significantly more creative than any individual team member and is often better able to push creative ideas through the implementation process so that they may become innovations. Here are ten quick rules for ensuring your teams are effective creative teams from Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Back to the Garden: An 8-Step Process for Creating a Culture of Innovation
Sustainable innovation cannot be achieved by mechanically lining up best practices and executing them. According to Mitchell Ditkoff, the real catalyzing agent for renewable innovation is the ground from which these best practices spring.
Creating a Culture of Innovation
Years of cost-cutting and focus on process excellence have created in many firms a culture that is focused on operational excellence and risk avoidance. For innovation to succeed as a corporate objective, the culture must change to accommodate the risk and uncertainty that accompanies an innovation focus. Luckily, several important levers can help you change the culture, as Jeffrey Phillips explains.
Questioning: An Underutilized Innovation Strategy
One of the most powerful innovation tools available to every member of a group - be it a team, a company division or an organization - is a tool that those individuals are often reluctant to use. The tool I am talking about, of course, is: questioning.
Cultivating Idea Stakeholders
In many organizations, big ideas cause change, and thus they tend to encounter a significant amount of resistance and inertia. The solution, according to Jeffrey Baumgartner, is to cultivate idea stakeholders. Read on to learn how to build support for your big ideas.
How to Foster Innovation using Corporate Imagination Exercises
If you want to make the most of the innovation potential of your employees, you need to encourage and promote the use of imagination. Jeffrey Baumgartner shares some techniques to stretch your team.
Innovating to Benefit your Company – and Your Employees
To what extent does an employee work – and innovate – to benefit the organization and to what extent does she work and innovate to benefit herself? Senior managers would like to believe that employees are a team of selfless workers who – in exchange for a monthly wage and odd benefits – work exclusively to the benefit of the organization. As the organization grows, the employee receives promotions, salary increases and additional benefits that encourage her to continue serving the company 100%.
Kaizen and Innovation
During this week, the Gang of Seven will be exploring the topic of kaizen – continuous improvement – and how it can be applied to project settings, where teams of people may only be working together for the duration of a project. Today's topic is "the case for kaizen on projects." As a first step, I’d like to clarify what the similarities and differences are between kaizen and innovation.
Innovation: A Leadership Issue
Creating a sustainable innovative environment is a leadership task. In order to succeed at this task, leaders must develop innovative abilities and develop them in their constituents. Here's how.
7 Strategies for Sustained Innovation
Sustained innovation comes from developing a collective sense of purpose; from unleashing the creativity of people throughout your organization and from teaching them how to recognize unconventional opportunities. Here are seven strategies for sustaining innovation in your organization.
How to nurture your creative passion
Do you have a big idea that you feel confident will change your world? Are you willing to take the risk of being audacious? According to Sandy Nelson, passion is the key to unleashing your creative energy.
Empowering innovation
A great leader can turn your team into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. Learn how to empower your employees to innovate in this article by Paul Sloane.
Imagination: The Number One Tool for Innovation and Creativity
Imagination is not a word you hear much about in business. Few companies, outside electronic game producers, would describe themselves as imaginative. That is a shame and a mistake. Imagination is the number one tool for creativity and innovation.
Presenting Innovation in a Way That Gets to ‘Yes’
As the global economy has improved and CEOs get past their hunker down/cut costs/survival mentality, the question of how to drive growth begins to dog them. But getting senior management to take action on innovation often needs a catalyst, and a solid strategy for getting them to say "yes" to innovation.