What your Definition of Innovation Says about Your Company
In a field centered around fresh, outside-the-box thinking, it is no wonder that there is such a broad range of definitions for the term innovation. Creating a clear-cut definition for the term is critical in shaping the culture of innovation at your organization and will help you determine which resources to allocate to your program.
The Changing Face of Corporate Intrapreneurship
In early September 85 smart people gathered for two days at the Pfizer conference center in New York City to talk about their practical experience in identifying, engaging, driving value from and (at times) failing with the most innovative employees in their respective businesses. The 2016 Corporate Intrapreneur Summit was 100% on point in targeting key areas of interest around how intrapreneurs in a corporate setting.
5 Counterintuitive Management and Innovation Tips From Rising Leaders
Business these days might as well require us to be tactical geniuses because it’s like navigating a field of landmines. One wrong step can completely blow you out of the water. The risks obviously aren't keeping everyone at bay, as new leaders are rising to face the challenges during these fast-paced, turbulent times. To help them on this quest, great leaders and managers of today share their most valuable management and innovation tips.
The Next Level of Open Innovation: Is Your Organization Ready?
Getting started with open innovation and developing the right foundation for open innovation has been a key challenge at many companies in the last three to five years. Now, internal as well as external forces are moving these companies towards the next level of open innovation in which we go beyond just products and technology and start to explore how a more open and collaborative mindset can be applied to all more business units and functions. Think procurement and engineering as examples.
Mad Scientists and Creativity Labs
Managing solitary and collaborative innovation: All innovation is based on creative ideas which are generated and developed by passionate people working alone and with others. Both solitary and collaborative work are important to the effective development of innovation in organizations. The key for leaders is to effectively promote both.
Cisco Ignites Companywide Startup Culture
In the past few years, the mass digitization of business and society has pressured every organization – large and small, private and public – to innovate at unprecedented speed. This digital revolution has incited a new and disruptive era of hyper competition. It has accelerated the pace of change exponentially. It has forced companies to reinvent themselves. And it has utterly disrupted institutions and their cultures, upended entire markets, and hatched new business models that challenge traditional ways of operating.
3 Reasons Crowdsourcing is Good for Small Businesses
Running a small business is not easy, especially when the small business is just starting out. Any misstep, even well-intentioned, can cause a serious setback. But have no fear! There’s a whole untapped squad of people out there ready to work for you for free! Here are three ways crowdsourcing is good for small businesses.
Urgently Wanted: The Design Driven Manager
The potential of Design Thinking becomes more and more visible because organizations like Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nike en Proctor & Gamble not only show overtly that they use it, but start showing significant results. They outperformed their peers in the last decade with 219%, measured by the Design Value Index (assessment by Design Management Institute).
Opening the Floodgates of Innovation: Insights from Deloitte Innovation Day
Take a quick glance around your office. What do you see? Categorically “Start-up” types in t-shirts and jeans passing bottles of craft beer around? Or “Suits”, with their collars starched to perfection, hunched over their laptops and scrambling away at emails? What would happen if we flipped these scenarios around? I for one, would love to see my accountant rock up to work in a Hawaiian Shirt; a calculator in one hand, and a piña colada in the other. But what difference would this make?
Are Results Based Work Environments the Future or Fantasy?
Results-based work environments, also known as results-only work environments (ROWE) aim to increase productivity by giving employees the freedom to work in the manner that suits them best as long as they produce results. The old paradigm of coming in to work at a set time and leaving at a set time hasn't been the standard for quite some time. Employees regularly have to work long hours, and there is research that shows these long hours may be better spent working from home. The Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College notes that this shift represents a dramatic change from the traditional 40-hour work week.
9 Steps for Establishing Your Employee Engagement Plan
You've got the best employees on the planet, right? They work hard and are experts in their fields. But, somewhere there is a disconnect. The culture of your organization is not everything it could be, not everything you would like. Is there a way to ensure that your employees hold to the same values you do throughout your department, or the organization? How can you empower your employees, and foster trust, growth, and loyalty? Here are nine ways to fully engage your employees.
Who Are the Great Innovators Among Us?
Humans are innately concerned with what makes up the creative inventors among us. We want to know how to cultivate our inner innovator and nurture those qualities that will serve us both as individuals and as employees.
The (Non)Sense of Employee-Focused Innovation Training
A lot has been written about Innovation Training in the recent past. At Culturevate, we clearly see the sense of such training, but there are some important conditions that needs to be met for these efforts to generate long-term impact for an organization. Not all companies understand these conditions, which often leads to mediocre results and missed opportunities. One extra difficulty is that a good Innovation Training should be driven by and aligned with several functional parts of a large corporate organization.
Innovate as a Team? Work on Your Psychological Safety!
To be able to use the full potential of innovation, psychological safety within teams and organisations is essential. Psychological safety is the shared belief that it is safe within the team for interpersonal risk taking. There is a direct relation between a psychological safe climate and performance of the team. (Edmondson 1999)
Why Innovation Fails (And How to Succeed)
Here’s a wild guess: the majority of large enterprises will probably claim they know exactly what innovation is all about. Yet, in spite of impressive resources, big companies are responsible for only a small fraction of disruptive innovations. What is at the root of this paradox? Why does so much innovation fail? And more importantly: what can companies do about it?
Innovation: Knowing Where to Begin
Let me see if this situation sounds familiar: you’ve promised your boss that you’ll generate at least one percent growth over last year. You’ve been racking your brain with ideas about how to improve your product or develop a new offering or finding new efficiencies which will help your margins, but the few ideas that you’ve come up with haven’t had legs and pages keep coming off the calendar.
The Creativity Delta: How to Come Up with New Ideas
In a study of 5,000 adults in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan conducted by Adobe about creativity, they came up with some interesting findings. To begin with, they asked every participant if they felt creativity was valuable to society and two-thirds of the respondents said “yes.” Perhaps even more significantly, 80% of them felt that unlocking creativity was critical to economic growth.
13 Practices of the World’s Most Innovative Organizations
Successful organizations know the significance of innovation in business. Apple is a good example of how effective innovation management can improve your products and scale up your business. After reaching on the brink of collapse, it achieved new heights of success by implementing effective innovation management policy. The success of its innovative management strategies once again brought it in the league of leading organizations. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to learn from innovative management strategies of successful organizations, consider the following thirteen strategies.
Innovative Workplace Benefits: Perks Employees Look For
One thing that successful companies usually have in common is their willingness to give their employees great perks and benefits. Having great workplace benefits increases the employee's willingness to go above and beyond for the company, which in turn benefits the organization.
Leadership Tips for Startup Entrepreneurs
An entrepreneur does not run a business with his or her acute business acumen alone: it comes with leadership skills. Here are some tips for a startup entrepreneur.
Great Companies Aren’t Built by Any One Person
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is thinking they can run their business alone. They think they can do all the heavy lifting by themselves. However, they are making a vital mistake. It takes many people working together to make a business run effectively. By failing to see this simple fact, business owners are putting themselves and their business in danger. By trying to control everything, they are limiting their company's’ potential profits.
Employee Innovation Training – What Approach Works Best?
As organizations increasingly focus on building corporate cultures that are more open to new ideas, they are examining ways that they can engage a range of employees in innovative thinking and actions. In the past, the answer to this kind of effort was to run a challenge and pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.
Making Work Fun to Improve Culture and Engagement
For HR and business managers, it can be challenging to create a productive workplace where employees are motivated to be engaged. It may be time to make work fun again with a variety of practices and tools that are implemented. To transform the environment of your workplace and create a positive environment. Here are a few simple changes that can benefit the business.
How Innovation and Authenticity Complement Each Other in a Corporate Environment
Authenticity and innovation are two of today’s biggest corporate buzzwords. They are often considered as separate values, but in reality they have much in common and in this article we will examine the areas of overlap and potential leverage benefits.