Innovation strategy: Prune the product tree
In his new book, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, author Luke Hohmann shares a very interesting group brainstorming exercise that can be quite helpful to teams that are trying to envision the future of their product or service offerings. It's called Prune the Product Tree, and here's how it works.
Innovation strategy: Leveraging the power of being an outsider
Why is it that, in industry after industry, it's almost always the outsider that develops the breakthrough innovations? Paul Graham, in a ChangeThis essay entitled The Power of the Marginal, tackles this issue and comes up with some really intriguing insights. He deconstructs the power of the outsider, and offers some helpful strategies for thinking like one.
Gerald ‘Solutionman’ Haman talks about innovation challenges, creativity tools and creative workspaces
When it comes to developing and using innovation and creativity tools, Gerald Haman has no equal. In this interview with InnovationTools founder Chuck Frey, Gerald shares his insights on innovation challenges, creativity tools and creative work environments.
The Innovation Killer tackles the human side of innovation
Many innovation books today are written to teach us new frameworks, strategies or best practices for making innovation work in our organizations. What's been lacking, however, are business books on how to tackle the people side of innovation. Fortunately for us, Cynthia Barton Rabe has decided to focus on this aspect of the topic in her new book, The Innovation Killer - How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine and What Smart Companies are Doing About It.
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.
Customer Intimacy and Empathy are Keys to Innovation
Just because a company is spending money on research (such as markets, customers, or new technologies) and development doesn't mean they will get innovation. Innovation, as with advertising, training, or many other organization investments, depends on the quality of the investment as much as the quantity of resources put in it. A high proportion of innovative new products, services, and companies flop. That's often because managers build better mousetraps without first making sure there are any mice out there. Or that people still want to catch them.
Unleash your inner genius: Ten great ways to boost your personal creativity
Let’s say you are wrestling with a tough issue – maybe at work, at home, with your children or in your social life. You have been stuck for a while and you can’t seem to [...]
The promise of open-source innovation
In their new book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, authors William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre offer some fascinating perspectives and case histories on the topic of open-source innovation.
Use a strategy canvas to identify innovation opportunities
In their excellent book, Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne share a fascinating technique for visualizing competitive differentiation and innovation opportunities. Called the "strategy canvas," it is both a diagnostic tool to show you what your current competitive situation looks like as well as a planning tool for identifying untapped innovation opportunities.
Look for the solution within the problem
Two prisoners dug a tunnel from their cell 80 feet to escape from prison. Where did they hide the dirt? This is one of the examples used by Roni Horowitz of the consultancy group SIT [...]
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.
Innovation and Learning through Successful Failures
One key to successful innovation is to learn quickly from failure, according to author Jim Clemmer.
The Greening of Innovation… And Profit
Sustainability is a growing issue for everyone on our planet and, not surprisingly, offers some huge opportunities for innovation, according to author Chas Martin.
The middle ground of innovation
When companies start up a new venture to explore a breakthrough innovation, there are many challenges. Some are operational, but others are caused by the ways in which leaders and managers typically think about their work. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, in their new book, 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, describe how companies often get lost in the gap between the beginning of the innovation process, were creativity is needed, and the end of the innovation process, were efficiency is needed.
Innovation by subtraction
We tend to think that the best way to innovate is to add new features to our products or services. What can we add that increases the appeal of our offering? This route can easily lead to extra cost, feature overload and customer fatigue. Sometimes a better answer lies in subtraction, says Paul Sloane.
Innovation Strategy: Are your Ideas Audacious Enough?
In most business ideas, there is a direct correlation between how audacious and risky an idea is and its innovativeness and reward potential. In this article, Jeffrey Baumgartner explores the relationship between audaciousness, risk and reward, and provides some advice on what the right mix is.
How many ways are there to solve a problem?
In his marvelous Idea Book, Fredrik Haren tells the story of a teacher who wanted her students to measure the height of a house using only a barometer. The "correct" answer she was looking for was that they should use the barometer to measure the difference in air pressure at the ground and the top of the house, and utilize that data to calculate the height of the house. One enterprising student, however, came up with some other unique yet valid solutions to this problem - which the teacher did not accept. This anecodote reminds us that there is more than one correct answer for any problem.
Enhance your creativity through storytelling
In Dan Pink's excellent book, A Whole New Mind, one of the seven principles for succeeding in today's "conceptual age" is story - the ability to create and share compelling narratives. Here are two exercises that can help you to improve your narrative capabilities.
Creative synthesis techniques from A Whole New Mind
I recently started reading Dan Pink's fascinating book, A Whole New Mind, and I'm really enjoying the exercises that he recommends at the end of each chapter. The principle of "symphony" - Dan's term for symthesis, the ability to create innovative new combinations and connections between seemingly unrelated bits of information - contains some especially interesting exercises. Here are several of them that I would like to share with you.
Thinking the Unthinkable
How can you encourage your employees to think of drastic innovations? Paul Sloane shares one simple technique that enables small teams to envision entirely new business models.
Evaluating an Idea’s Potential Using ‘PPC’
Most of us have a tendency to discard ideas too quickly, because we cannot see the potential value. Gary Bertwistle of Blue Moon Creative, author of the new book The Keys to Creativity, has come up with a technique that he calls PPC, which stands for Positives, Potentials and Concerns, that can help you to overcome this tendency.
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%.
Innovation is everyone’s job
In their fascinating book, INsourcing Innovation, authors David Silverstein, Neil DeCarlo and Michael Slocum point out that innovation is practiced in many companies today by a small, select group of highly educated people. For innovation to become more structured and repeatable, more people need to be trained in the processes and methodologies of innovation.
Creativity in reverse: a new way to use TRIZ
Much of creativity is focused on solving problems or creating new solutions to replace or improve upon what already exists. But sometimes the problem we