How a Decision Room Can Enable Change and Innovation
One of the challenges leaders face in times of uncertainty and rapid change is helping senior managers to engage in bigger-picture thinking. To enable this process, a growing number of companies are creating “decision rooms” – dedicated areas that help them visualize challenges and opportunities from a number of perspectives and make better decisions.
Be an A-Tension Seeker: Why Good Ideas Stem from Irritating Problems?
All too often we see companies coming to us with a new technological advancement that they are very excited about. Sadly, having a new technology does not guarantee a winning innovation. One needs to work hard at the front end to understand what the consumer needs and how the current market offer isn’t meeting those needs. Only against this backdrop can we hope to bring an idea to market that will be truly disruptive. The following article explains.
Get a Taxi – Anatomy of a Process Innovation
With over 400 million Google hits, “innovation” may be considered a buzzword, some entrepreneurs may even avoid talking about it, but they’re certainly practicing it! This article takes a closer look at an example of process innovation in the service industry. Understanding it better offers the possibility of spotting a large range of opportunities and converting them into business successes.
The Dynamic Duo of Innovation: Ethnography and Big Data
The combination of Big Data and ethnographics can be a potent toolset for uncovering innovation opportunities, as a growing number researchers are discovering.
Searching for Needs is the Best Innovation Strategy
Is it possible that only a quarter of all companies are highly effective at the front end of innovation? If so, what kinds of companies are most successful at the ideation and conversion stages? Gijs van Wulfen describes three different kinds of companies and suggests the Need Seekers strategy offers the greatest potential for superior performance in the long term.
Innovation Method – Copy and Paste
One of the most common operations performed on a computer is copy and paste. We copy a section of a webpage and paste it into a document. We take it for granted. We grab an idea from one place and put it to use in another. So why not use this method for your next product or service innovation?
A Simple Exercise in Anticonventional Thinking
Anticonventional thinking forces out of our normal pathways of creative problem solving to consider a wider range of potential solutions. Jeffrey Baumgartner explains how it works via a simple example.
Conflict in Teams – Does it Stimulate Creativity & Innovation?
Conflict is a dreaded word. Most people associate conflict with interpersonal clashes ranging from inelegant avoidance tactics in the breakroom to fierce and open hostility. Surely, it is obvious that conflict in teams is detrimental to creativity and innovation. But is it? In this post we will explore this matter further and see when conflict sometimes can enhance the creative thinking skills of teams.
Creativity: Why it’s Better to Turn your Problems into Goals
When it comes to creative problem solving, which is more effective? Focusing on the problem at hand, or on setting goals for what we'd like to accomplish? Jeffrey Baumgartner explores this perplexing question and comes to a very clear conclusion.
Get Innovative in Helping Employees to Accommodate Change
You can find in this article a grasp overview of reasons for change in our organization and how it could be boosted by applying innovative approaches.
Designing the Perfect Ideas Competition
What's the most effective way to design an idea competition that doesn't just result in a huge pile of ideas, but enables teams to implement ideas that will help to make your organization more creative? Jeffrey Baumgartner shares one practical framework for making this happen.
Expertise and its Role in Innovative Problem Solving
The nature of problems in innovative work is that they are often ill defined, novel to the individual who engaged them, and complex in that often several solutions exist to the same problem. In this post we will see how expertise is an important factor in innovative problem solving, and how leaders and organizations can cultivate R&D team expertise.
Creative Problem Solving Technique: Become the Problem
When we are trying to generate ideas in order to solve a problem, whether through anticonventional thinking, brainstorming or another method, we typically distance ourself slightly from the problem. We look for ideas on how to improve our company’s product, how to deliver better customer service, how to cut costs or alternative business models. In all of these cases, we separate ourselves from the problem and, by so doing, we potentially limit our understanding of the problem. Why not take a different approach and become the problem?
Accurate Problem Definition is Critical to Effective Problem Solving
In business and in life, clear and accurate problem definition is an essential prerequisite for effective problem solving. This may sound obvious, or even trite, but this simple truth can be overlooked by those with pressing needs and a bias for action.
A promising Approach to Finding Technology Solutions: Supplier Summits
Given the relatively small number of qualified solution providers for any given technical challenge, one fairly productive and successful problem solving approach undertaken by corporate technology seekers is to organize "supplier summits."
Wicked Problems Demand Various Viewpoints
All organizations face wicked problems – highly complex issues demanding multiple viewpoints to be solved. In this blog Susanna Bill argues why innovation needs to leave the single product dominant perspective behind and take social aspects into consideration.
How to Build Your Innovation Skills
In the 21st century economy, having strong innovation skills is critical. This year, instead of the proverbial New Year’s resolution to lose weight or get a new job, why not commit to building your innovation ability? This article discusses the urgency for building your innovation skills, and outlines some simple and effective ways for doing it.
How to Break Out of the Commodity Trap: A Lesson from Mickey Mouse
Look at almost any industry and you will see companies struggling to differentiate what they have to offer from everything else in the marketplace. So it’s hardly surprising that one of the most common complaints I hear from senior executives is “My product is becoming commoditized. Is there a way out?”
Innovators Look for Problems
A brand new innovation often requires changing a person’s behavior or habits, which can be a nearly impossible task! So why not approach innovation by looking at existing problems? Gijs van Wulfen looks at 10 practical problems and innovative new products or services solving them.
Don’t let Market Research Myopia Distract you from Innovation
Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.
40 Reasons Why People Struggle with Innovation
The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. For the new edition of my book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services' I have posted a question on front-end innovation struggles to innovation practioners in more than 20 linkedin groups. The response was massive. I made a list of forty reasons why people struggle starting innovation in their companies in daily practice.
The Competition is Not Who You Think It Is
It has become extremely difficult to foresee competition. But this isn’t cause for alarm. It’s now far more important to forge ahead with innovation, allowing a product or service to evolve in new ways, than trying to crush or outsmart perceived competition.
Use Front and Back End of Innovation Skills
With a front-end that's fuzzy and a back end that isn't very effective, no wonder creating new products and services isn't easy. Gijs van Wulfen explains why connecting the two can enhance inspiration and smooth the innovation implementation process.
Biomimicry: How Business Solves Problems by Looking to Nature
Sometimes, talking about new ways of approaching business benefits from looking at some of the world's oldest ways of doing business. Biomimicry is a practical methodology to solve problems by looking to nature. Learn more from some examples of biomimicry on social media and co-creation.