The Art Of Innovation | 10 Things To Learn From Guy Kawasaki
The agenda of our first management meeting in 2021 was ‘How can we innovate to thrive this year?’ We were clear that if we continue to do the same thing we did last year, there is no way we can bring any change in our growth.
Why Your Innovation Process is a Recipe for Failure
Having a process for the front end of innovation is necessary but not sufficient. It also requires proper levels of funding, and a governance structure to support it. In this article, we'll look at how these aspects tie together, and how your company can support your full innovation lifecycle.
The Key Steps Innovation Professionals Should Take in a COVID-19 Environment
Obviously COVID-19 is having an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, with the scope and scale of business disruption being immense and incredibly challenging. But disruption is what innovation people are generally excellent at responding to, so the question becomes - “how do you and your team support your organisations within this environment?”
Getting From Ideas to Products
In a time when innovation and new product development are vital to remain competitive, large organizations are looking for ways to generate and execute new product ideas while mitigating risk. Increasingly, these companies seek to create a startup culture as a means to generate innovation.
Applying Collaborative Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing: an Example of Lean
Achieving authentic transformation across the manufacturing enterprise can seem as challenging as playing a competitive game of Jenga® in woolen mittens. In this article the innovation architect Doug Collins explores the role that collaborative innovation can play in realizing meaningful change. He grounds the exploration with an example from lean.
Collaborative Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing: Just Getting Started
Advanced manufacturers—people who make “things”—face the same challenges in the Digital Age as their counterparts that traffic wholly in bits and bytes. Relentless immediacy. Increased transparency. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on the results from a survey that the analyst firm Frost & Sullivan conducted as part of the Manufacturing Leadership Council. What are the more advanced of the advanced manufacturing thinking these days about the practice of collaborative innovation? Are they on track?
Shaping the Future
Think of the future. Go on! Now tell me honestly what is the furthest point in time that you imagined. If it was three years then I’m not surprised. After all, in business three seems almost to be some sort of talisman. We have three year business plans, 2-3 year product development cycles and of course there is that ubiquitous interview question about where you see yourself in three year’s time.
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.
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.
From “Premium” to “Good Enough”: Frugal Innovation in the Emerging Markets
Frugal engineering means developing simple products for emerging markets and is becoming increasingly important for many companies. Frugal products are not cheap or inferior, they are simplified and yet qualitatively robust. But how can frugal products be developed successfully?
Systematizing Breakthrough Innovation: Study Results
Most companies recognize the need for breakthrough innovation – it can change the fundamental bases of competition, “rewrite the rules” of an industry and transform the prospects of the successful innovator. There is no one-size-fits-all model for how best to respond to this challenge. Arthur D. Little surveyed over 80 large organizations to explore how to deliver a consistent pipeline of radically new products, performance features, business models and market space.
How to Avoid Robot-Zombie Innovation
In order to create Breakthrough Innovations, you need to abandon the corporate robot-zombie talk, says Andrew Benson. By cultivating an open and free form innovation culture organizations can avoid the idea logjams created by formal innovation processes.
Hyperselect – Identifying Top Ideas and Projects with Higher Precision
Clear separation of top ideas from mediocre and weak ideas is essential, before financial and other resources are allocated. The Hyperselect method provides a new, sound and improved way to fulfill this task. Moreover it reveals, that hyperbolas might be “the better matrix” in quite a lot of methods for prioritization and beyond.
7 Things to Do Before Starting Any Project
Everyone plans tasks in different ways, but the largest, most complicated projects have tried-and-tested methodologies that help break processes down and ensure that stakeholders and different departments are clear about which tasks need to be completed by whom and by what time. This article breaks project planning down into seven key tasks that have to be completed before work begins to give the project the best possible chance of coming in on time and on budget.
An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself
Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers. Using external resources can often avoid pitfalls and align the portal success rate to corporate expectations, objectives and ambitions. Here six questions are asked that can help you take the decision whether to launch a managed portal internally or externally.
Transforming How We Work
The essence of agility is the ability to respond to new and different conditions. You cannot continue repeating the same old operating formula long beyond its utility or you will be left behind. Are you prepared to adapt to the profuse variety of new circumstances with new tactics and strategies? The principles of Agile that we examine in the next three chapter excerpts of Agile Innovation will help you understand what you need to do.
Digging into Your Consumers’ Needs, with Naivety
In an inspiring conversation with Terese Alstin, co-founder of Hövding, the invisible helmet company, Cesar Malacon highlights the innovator’s ability to remain naïve when developing new products and introduces a contemplative approach to find consumers’ real needs.
6 Mind Mapping Uses for Personal Productivity
With the increase of, and dramatic improvement in, mind mapping software and its emergence as a value-adding toolkit conveniently available for use on our computers, laptops, tablets, etc. signifies that mind-mapping can be used within an every-day working environment. Jamie MacDonald takes a closer look at six uses for mind mapping in business situations that most of us engage in on a frequent basis.
Overcommitting and Underutilizing Resources is Risky Business
Bringing innovative products, methods, and ideas to market requires companies to apply resources to their most promising concepts and that can be expensive, requiring lots of talent, if they want to be fast and first to market. The problem is that most companies overcommit their limited resources by approving more ideas than they execute. They do it because they lack a clear view into their resource capacity.
The Growth Accelerator – Managing Innovation Based Growth
Growth is on the top of the management agenda as shareholders simply demand return on invested capital and current business is not delivering it. So what is the best route companies can take to achieve it? How can companies create and accelerate growth? To succeed companies must possess the capabilities and take a systematic approach to go beyond their core business.
Eight Important Facts about NPD and R&D Portfolio Management
Often the tasks at hand take our focus off of the big picture. In new product development (NPD) and R&D portfolio management, there are several “givens” that may seem obvious when stated but are often overlooked. Bring your attention back to these eight tried and true ways to improve your portfolio management and increase your product development productivity.
Bringing Maturity to the Front-End: 5 Best Practices for Building Capability
Knowing the best practices to follow is key to avoiding the pitfalls in new product development (NPD) process integration. Whether you’re a ways down the path toward a mature architecture or just getting started, here are five tips gathered from 30+ years of helping product development organizations improve their productivity and mature their full architecture of NPD.
Shark Tank Your Gate Meetings
A gated product development process is often implemented by organizations to assist in scrutinizing projects throughout their lifecycle to ensure only the fittest survive. Unfortunately, many of the checks and balances lack the teeth required to kill doomed projects before they squander resources. How can a TV show provide valuable insight into your gate meetings? Stay tuned to learn more.
Mourning the Dead: Why You Should Have a Funeral after Killing Your Product
Pulling the plug on an in-flight project is hard. No one wants to be the person calling it quits, offending team members and admitting defeat. It is this mentality, however, that ends up sucking the life out of resources and budgets and setting the organization up for continued failure because the process is broken. How can you ensure only the right projects survive, wrong ones are killed early and lessons are celebrated after an appropriate mourning period? It’s going to take courage.
Informing Innovation Planning through Product Line Roadmapping
Innovation is about moving an organization forward. But many companies are trying to get there without an execution plan; without any way to assess the how, why, where, what and when, and to adjust when the unexpected comes along (as it always does). Those involved with innovation planning are increasingly understanding that the answers are found in product line roadmapping – a critical front-end process that has finally come of age.
Measure the Maturity of Your Idea-to-Launch Process
We know that innovation capability is a critical driver of strategic growth targets. We also know that innovation success is not a one-time occurrence, but the result of an organization’s ability to conceive, develop and commercialize new products and services on a sustainable basis. In this article Dr. Scott J. Edgett discusses a model for measuring if your organization has a mature innovation process with well-internalized innovation capabilities.
The Results Are In: Product Leaders Report a Need for Speed and a Roadmap to Sustainable Innovation
Findings from the Fourth Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey
Imagine sailing in the World Cup race without a strategic plan or a map. It is a sport where speed is of the essence, decisions (and perhaps more importantly the timing of those decisions) are paramount, and team talents must be optimized at any moment. With competitors abound displaying their impressive spinnakers and advanced technology--only the risk takers advance. The will to win is apparent, yet without a strategy and a map, a team would drift into execution mode and lose the race.
Your Consumer and the Innovation Equation – Why They May Not Be Involved Enough
Identifying (let alone creating) a new innovation that will dramatically grow your business is difficult. Line extensions and product / package refreshes will keep the business moving forward and engaged with consumers. But what about the breakthrough innovation that executives are expecting? Transformational innovation requires significant investment, risk taking, and preparation which can be a challenge to coordinate.