Three Megatrends that will Affect Everybody’s Business
The future is hard to predict and a lot of “experts” regularly get it wrong. However, there are some facts so important and trends so inevitable that leaders would be ill-advised to ignore and not try to anticipate. Here are three of many future megatrends that will not necessarily determine what will happen, but will most likely have a big impact on everybody’s business in the coming years to decades.
5 Advantages to Crowdsourced Innovation Management
At the beginning of the twentieth century, research and development was a highly guarded and elite practice. Imagine laboratories peopled by white-coated scientists who had passwords to protect the doors to their office. This kind of research and innovation was highly successful for a long time – it gave us electrocardiography, DNA fingerprinting, and many Apple products.
5 Traits that Make a Good Leader
Whether leaders are the captain of a team, the head of a household or the president of a company, their quest usually revolves around one thing: success. Quality leadership skills are often hard to measure on a daily basis, but their long-term effects are obvious and undeniable. Leaders are a lot of things and contain many traits, but there are five essential habits that, if practiced and pursued in an honest and consistent fashion, can help turn anyone into a leader and enable them to create their own success.
The Four Key Capacities to Successfully Engage Employees in the Innovation Process
In this IM Channel One webinar authors Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant share research from their latest book, When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business, which identifies the four key capacities that must be developed inside organizations in order to successfully engage employees in the innovation process.
Research Reveals Success Factors of Fast-Growing Startups
Experienced leadership, a concept designed for scalability and timing, is the most important factor influencing fast-growing startups, also known as scale-ups. Only 1 out of 200 startups become a scale-up valued over $10 million within 5 years. THNK and Deloitte conducted quantitative research to analyze the dynamics and characteristics of 400.000 startups.
Taking a Leaf Out of Your Childhood in Your Professional Life
The way we develop as children can greatly impact the way in which we conduct ourselves as adults. Our early experiences and discoveries have a significant influence on the growth of various personality traits, such as leadership, the ability to work as part of a team and communication, which can have a big impact on our professional lives.
5 Ways to Improve Your Small Office Culture
Employers often seek cost effective, informal ways to enhance office culture. These strategies usually involve improving channels of communication in very basic, informal ways. But every company is not the same. Small companies have the advantage of creating a unique culture with no visible boundaries. So how can these organizations take advantage of this?
The Urgent Intrapreneur Opportunity: An Introduction for Corporate Leaders
The power and freedom that entrepreneurs and their startups embody is reinforced through a constant stream of media highlighting success, purpose and (mostly bullsh*t) bucolic work environments. As the global economy improves, business leaders of established corporate organizations need to consider how they can introduce an entrepreneurial spirit. Intrapreneurs are the answer, and this article provides a high level overview.
Try Using the Institutional Yes
When new ideas are voiced in your company is the typical response ‘yes but…’? If so, you’re really saying ‘No’ and closing the door on new ideas and open-minded employees. Paul Sloane says we could all learn a lesson from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by implementing the Institutional Yes.
The 2015 Global Innovation Economy Survey
The state of the global innovation economy is alive and well, according to a recent survey report featuring organisations actively developing and implementing new technologies and solutions across a range of industries.
Follow the Crowd or Create the Marketplace
It’s follow my leader time for the world’s stock markets. Concerns over the state of the Chinese economy have seen markets plunge into freefall, only for some to bounce upwards again a few hours later. At the time of writing, markets are still in flux with analysts divided on the eventual outcome.
Top 5 Tips for Outsourcing Your Learning and Development
Although a lot of companies would undoubtedly prefer to keep all of their operations in-house, this sometimes isn’t realistic. Whether you are suffering from budget or other resource restrictions, lack of personnel or a general lack of time to do a high-quality job, many other organisations are available to handle things on your behalf.
Design Thinking + Business Model Innovation
There has been a lot of buzz around designing new and innovative business models. But what does it mean to design a new business model? How do you apply design thinking to business model innovation?
3 Reasons Crowdsourced Innovation Is Difficult
David Alan Grier wrote in Crowdsourcing for Dummies “the hardest part of crowdsourcing is raising the right crowd.” It is one of the realities of crowd ideation that continues to hold true – that if you can’t draw a crowd to help you generate innovative ideas, then you’re not evolving beyond the traditional closed approach to innovation.
The Product of The Future
What will the product of the future be like – and how will it be different than today’s products? Generally, all products will become part virtual, part physical. They will be connected, reconfigurable and – hopefully – smart. Also, the business model for their manufacturers will be dramatically different.
The Ticking Talent Time Bomb and Its Impact on Established Corporations
When I meet with corporate leaders we invariably get onto the topic of their business challenges. Some reoccurring themes that are increased competition, cost / margin pressures, regulatory hassles, globalization, etc. However, the more recent discussions have centered around one theme. Talent.
Don’t Be Afraid of Upsetting People – A Negative Reaction is Better than no Reaction
South Park is a highly successful cartoon sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central TV network. The show was launched in 1997 and quickly became notorious for its rude language, minimalist characters and black, surreal satire. It was aimed at an adult audience and poked fun at a wide range of topical or taboo subjects. South Park has received many accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards. It is the third longest-running cartoon series in the U.S. behind The Simpsons and Arthur. Yet it was very nearly cancelled when initial tests showed that most people did not like it.
How Innovation Vendors Are Changing, and The Implications For Clients
Over the past couple of years, the services and solutions offered by innovation vendors have quietly shifted in new and interesting ways, with direct implications for corporate innovation leaders. Given that it is the middle of a long hot summer, I thought that it might be timely to outline some of the changes that I see taking place, and their impact on innovation leaders going forward.
Sensing is Exploring Uncharted Territory
Where do you start when you want something new? Whether the aim is just an improvement, a small incremental change or something more unique, disruptive and breakthrough, the start will probably determine where you end up. Do you start jotting down ideas? Do you grab a whiteboard and Post-Its, get a few people in the room, and start brainstorming?
Incubadoras e Aceleradoras de Inovação: O Que Acontece Quando Elas Vão Mal?
Escrevi recentemente um artigo que traçou uma nova abordagem para o desenvolvimento e apoio de incubadoras e aceleradoras de inovação dentro de organizações corporativas. O artigo parece ter tocado um nervo devido ao número de pessoas que chegou a mim para oferecer suas experiências com incubadoras / aceleradoras. Enquanto recebi uma gama de opiniões, fiquei realmente mais interessado nas histórias de fracasso.
Cut Costs in Health Care by Treating it Like Pollution
We seem to have a problem. Health care costs are doubling every thirteen years in the US, (Regalado 2013). By 2030 they will devour a third of the US federal budget (Regalado 2013). In spite of this, the US was ranked last in 2011 by the Commonwealth Fund in quality of health care among similar countries (Wikipedia 2013). We can sense the impending disaster and it seems the hope is that our usual panaceas for all problems, policy, technology or better education, will someday deliver us from our pains. But how?
Tips to Achieve an Innovative and Differentiated Startup Project
This is the era of rapid changes and disruptive innovations, and no startup, irrespective of size or industry, should be launched without a high degree of innovation and differentiation. This article is about the why, what, and the how— the systematic way to achieve this, based on the long international experience of the author, Dr. Stephen M. Sweid.
5 Steps to Embed Innovation in Your Daily Working Life
Innovation is a word that’s been heard on the lips of more CEOs, read in more broadsheet papers, and detailed in more business magazines in the last ten months than ever before. It’s well regarded that those businesses that fail to innovate risk death; consider the sad fates of longstanding companies like Woolworths, Polaroid, Blockbuster, and Borders over the last ten years. But how, as an individual, can you incorporate innovation and creative thinking into your everyday working life, all while keeping up with the already manic pace of modern business?
Heading for Mass Extinction
Global diversity is in crisis. Scientists have recently announced that our planet is in the middle of the sixth global mass extinction event and this time it’s man-made. Not since the time of the dinosaurs have so many species been under threat and it’s not just the environmental infrastructure which should be giving us cause for concern.