Innovation and management dogma
In his new book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel says that one of the biggest and most deeply entrenched impediments to innovation in any corporation is management dogma, the unwritten beliefs and rules for "how we do business around here." He outlines a number of key questions that you can use to begin to uncover deeply held beliefs about management, so they can be discussed openly and alternatives considered.
Set drastic expectations for growth, innovation
Setting moderate growth goals leads to incrementalism. To innovate, you need to set drastic goals that force employees to seek out new sources of revenues and to conceive new business models, according to Paul Sloane.
Five Mistakes Companies Make when Measuring Innovation
The discussion about whether or not to do innovation is over. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate that innovation is central to higher margins, higher customer loyalty and long term viability. What leaders now struggle with is how do I do it and how do I measure it?
Three impediments to innovation: Gary Hamel
In his excellent new book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel acknowledges that there are many barriers to innovation, but singles out three that he believes can be particularly destructive, because they're practically invisible to most leaders.
Creativity and the performance paradox
According to Stephen Shapiro, sometimes the best solutions to a creative challenge are counter-intuitive and run against conventional wisdom. Here are four examples.
Innovation and skills agility
As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, driven by increased global collaboration and rapid advances in technology, a growing need will be for organizations to locate the right skills base to carry its innovation initiatives forward. So says Jim Carroll, author of the new book, Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.
When to Kill an Idea
The problem most people and organizations have is that they tend to kill ideas at the wrong times, either too early or too late, and this is very detrimental to their innovation process. Jeffrey Baumgartner explains to how to establish common-sense criteria for killing an idea
How to Conduct a Visual Brainstorming Session
Brainstorming verbally frequently does not work. Visual brainstorming, that is brainstorming with images, objects and actions frequently works spectacularly well.
Innovation strategy: Battlefield lessons for business leaders
History is full of example of innovative tactics winning the day, sometimes against formidable odds. What lessons can business leaders today learn from the history of warfare? Plenty, explains Paul Sloane.
Innovation technique: Define your ideal competitor
Paul Sloane's new book, The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity, contains a fascinating innovation exercise that can help you to identify new opportunities for your business, and hopefully prevent it from being blindsided by an unexpected competitor. Here's how it works.
New: Stephen Shapiro’s Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas
Innovation expert Stephen Shapiro (author of the book, 24-7 Innovation), has just published a new e-book of innovation tips entitled the Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas. It contains over 75 tips to help you to increase the creative potential of your employees, make innovation repeatable and sustainable, and create an organic culture of innovation.
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.
Right ways of working with the left brain
How can you more skillfully bring out the best in the left-brained people who dominate your organization? Mitch Ditkoff and Val Vadeboncoeur share 32 techniques that you can use to get your people thinking!
Being Innovative in a Big Company
One of the problems that many large organizations face is how to innovate successfully within the confines of a massive, bureaucratic operational structure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of research and development, where small, entrepreneurial firms routinely do end runs on large companies will multi-million dollar research budgets.
When it Comes to Innovation, Trust your Intuition
MBA students are taught to treat business in a rational, scientific way. They analyze situations, develop financial models, critically examine management decisions and logically examine different scenarios. When they emerge from the hallowed halls of academia, they are often surprised to find that businesses run much less on logic and much more on emotion. It is not cold, intelligent analysis that drives most organizations forward. Emotional energy is often the real engine behind successful people and organisations.
Turning Your Ideas into Action
As important as creativity and idea creation are, they require action before any idea will have real value. These six ideas from Kevin Eikenberry can help you take that all important next step on your ideas.
Framework Innovation and Detail Innovation
A combination of detail and framework innovation is a potent recipe for business success, according to Jeffrey Baumgartner. What are framework and detail innovation? Read on to find out.
Who should manage innovation projects?
At many organizations, innovation projects are often assigned to young, ambitious junior executives. But these efforts tend to be doomed to failure, according to Paul Sloane, writing in his new book, The Innovation Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity.
The innovative leader: Be an arsonist and a fire fighter
To be successful, innovative leaders need to have the characteristics of both arsonists and fire fighters, according to author Paul Sloane. Read on to learn how this apparent dichotomy is possible, and what it means for you as a leader in your organization.
New book by Paul Sloane: The Innovative Leader
Popular InnovationTools author Paul Sloane recently sent me a copy of his latest book, The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity. I've just started reading it, but I can already tell that I'm really going to like it. The book is not a long, academic tome about business innovation and creativity, but rather is broken up into numerous bite-sized chunks of one to two pages each. This makes it easy for busy innovators to digest, as well as making it a practical reference volume on your bookshelf.
Become an idea collector
Ideas are the lifeblood of improvement in any area of our life. But we can't always implement the ideas we get the minute we get them, and sometimes these strokes of genius get misplaced or lost in our minds. The solution is to capture them immediately.
Harnessing the energy of change champions
The most successful change and innovation efforts are often accomplished by a change champion, a 'mono-maniac with a mission,' according to Jim Clemmer. Here are some strategies that will help you to support your organization's change champions.
Michael Raynor: The Strategy Paradox
Michael Raynor, co-author of of The Innovator's Solution with Clayton Christiansen, has written a new book entitled The Strategy Paradox: When Committing to Success Leads to Failure and What To Do About It. The premise of this book is an intriguing one: making a commitment to an innovative, risky strategy, which carries with it the potential of great success and excellent return on investment, is just as likely to produce a spectacular failure.