The Frustrated Innovation Team: What Should They Do?
Many executives talk a lot about innovation, but they don't really know how to make it happen. A corporate innovation team asks themselves: How do we "educate" our executives on innovation management and develop stronger corporate innovation capabilities together?
Supporting Innovation with Autonomy and Accountability
Innovation tends to thrive in an environment where there are less bureaucratic restraints and an appetite for calculated risk. However, without a structured management system in place, experimentation can go awry and great ideas risk falling by the wayside. This is where accountability and autonomy can provide the essential framework to support the innovation process to its full potential.
Creativity is Key: Tips on Avoiding Groupthink
It’s awesome when everyone agrees, isn’t it? Yes—and no. Most of us have, at some point, fallen into the trap of groupthink to avoid conflict and promote harmony in a group, whether at school, work, or on a committee. Groupthink has its perks: everyone feels comfortable, and there’s no risk of tension among members. It’s safe. Easy. Unfortunately, it can also kills creativity and innovation.
How Improvisation can Boost Innovation
If you have an innovative culture already in place (meaning you’re working with stuff like agile project management, design thinking, lean, etc.) perhaps it’s time you consider Applied Improvisation Training. If instead you are a static and uncommunicative company, Applied Improvisation may even work against your innovation efforts. Edoardo Binda Zane explains more.
Executing on Innovation – The Required Key Ingredients
Innovation: We all have seen the biggest, most successful companies talk about it and share their success stories. We have read about it in the latest business journals and magazines. We all want it in our organization but the right recipe with the right ingredients is often elusive. In this article we will share different views and discuss key ingredients required to create, execute, and innovate in your organization.
How to Engage Team Members from Different Branches
Employees located in the same office generally have no lack of interaction and can discuss their projects and demanding tasks together any time. But those who work in different branches and different cities may face real problems with team work. The same happens with those who work remotely and don’t have a physical office. Among the growing number of startups along with big international organizations this problem is growing. Roughly 87% of organizations admit that engagement is one of their top challenges that should be addressed in a proper manner.
Innovation Fitness: Measuring It to Maximize It
To gauge the innovation capabilities of an enterprise, it is helpful to apply a systematic method for assessing the quality of, and the relationship between the various and distinct dimensions that drive all functions of the enterprise. As with a sports team, simply having talent does not ensure success. It is the quality of the team work which ultimately elevates or hinders the level of their play.
Your ‘Innovative’ Workplace is not Enough
The term “innovative workplace culture” is increasingly clichéd, with little thought about what it means in practice. And yet a successful workplace culture is a business imperative for companies expected to lead the way in design and innovation in today’s experience economy.
Harnessing Corporate Activism To Transform A Pharmaceutical Giant with Celine Schillinger
When Céline Schillinger looked around her workplace she saw that the system didn’t value the diversity of competencies that different people could bring. They were being wasted. The system was focusing on a very narrow bandwidth of talents and always promoted the same kind of people, coming from the same background, and with the same kind of thinking. She decided to do something about it. Céline was called a troublemaker by her bosses, but thanks to her passion to grow and improve on rigid corporate systems, she was awarded Woman of the Year — La Tribune Women’s Awards in 2013. Céline is now the Head of Quality Innovation & Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
How to Increase your ‘Return on Innovation’?
While the importance of innovation is crystal clear for many organizations, daily execution usually remains challenging. When renewing products, services or business processes, companies often encounter the same obstacles. But what if companies could learn from each other? Can innovation be streamlined by sharing successes and failures? That’s precisely what the first CREAX innovation roundtable was determined to find out. In collaboration with Oracle, we gathered a diverse group of innovation professionals for a lively debate on how to move from theorizing to getting things done. This is what we learned.
15 Innovative Meeting Formats that Boost Creativity and Strengthen Engagement
How to organise a meeting in such a way that they result in creativity and energy? How to ensure that people are actively participating instead of being only passively attending meetings?
Disrupting Finance From Within a Leading Swiss Bank with Dave Bruno
David Bruno is Head of Innovation for a large Swiss Bank, and the co-founder of YNOME, a transparent marketplace that rates your financial management providers and helps you assemble your own private bank. David is innovating the fintech industry and discusses how he builds trust and transparency in an industry that’s notoriously very hush-hush and filled with regulations. He also provides insights into how he builds a diverse, multifaceted team to successfully innovate for the millennial market.
Creating an Innovation Network with Rob Wolcott
As Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) and a Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Rob Wolcott knows a bit about networking and the politics of innovation. In this episode of Innovation Ecosystem Rob shares practical advice for intrapreneurs who are looking to get stuff done from within the middle of the organization. And for growth leaders of businesses, he also has some great tips about where to get your inspiration!
Mad Scientists and Creativity Labs
Managing solitary and collaborative innovation: All innovation is based on creative ideas which are generated and developed by passionate people working alone and with others. Both solitary and collaborative work are important to the effective development of innovation in organizations. The key for leaders is to effectively promote both.
The Leadership Mindset: Disciplined Collaboration, Followership and Purpose
What makes a successful leader? Is there a secret formula for outstanding leadership above and beyond natural charisma? This is one of the golden questions that every HR manager and business owner wants to know. In fact, countless books and articles have been written on the subject. Emmanuel Gobillot is a leading author and speaker on the fundamentals of effective leadership and in this interview with Mark Bidwell he shares key insights about cultivating the leader's mindset.
Opening the Floodgates of Innovation: Insights from Deloitte Innovation Day
Take a quick glance around your office. What do you see? Categorically “Start-up” types in t-shirts and jeans passing bottles of craft beer around? Or “Suits”, with their collars starched to perfection, hunched over their laptops and scrambling away at emails? What would happen if we flipped these scenarios around? I for one, would love to see my accountant rock up to work in a Hawaiian Shirt; a calculator in one hand, and a piña colada in the other. But what difference would this make?
9 Steps for Establishing Your Employee Engagement Plan
You've got the best employees on the planet, right? They work hard and are experts in their fields. But, somewhere there is a disconnect. The culture of your organization is not everything it could be, not everything you would like. Is there a way to ensure that your employees hold to the same values you do throughout your department, or the organization? How can you empower your employees, and foster trust, growth, and loyalty? Here are nine ways to fully engage your employees.
Innovate as a Team? Work on Your Psychological Safety!
To be able to use the full potential of innovation, psychological safety within teams and organisations is essential. Psychological safety is the shared belief that it is safe within the team for interpersonal risk taking. There is a direct relation between a psychological safe climate and performance of the team. (Edmondson 1999)
Do You Know the Seven Stages of Innovation?
At IdeaScale, we define prolific innovators as organizations that have moved more than half of their ideas to the final stage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every suggested idea became a value-generating, implemented reality. This means that the completed ideas had each been investigated, responded to, and a decision was made to move forward or not. But of course, at least a portion of those completed ideas generate measurable constructive outcomes.
Great Companies Aren’t Built by Any One Person
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is thinking they can run their business alone. They think they can do all the heavy lifting by themselves. However, they are making a vital mistake. It takes many people working together to make a business run effectively. By failing to see this simple fact, business owners are putting themselves and their business in danger. By trying to control everything, they are limiting their company's’ potential profits.
New Growth Opportunities Through Strategic Innovation and Business Design Thinking
All successful companies must eventually answer the same basic question: How do you establish new growth strategies and business opportunities from within your organization? The new book, The Art of Opportunity was written to help your business answer that question. The concepts were cultivated through more than 20 years of academic research and experience, providing organizations with a detailed blueprint for how to grow, innovate, and transform.
How Innovation and Authenticity Complement Each Other in a Corporate Environment
Authenticity and innovation are two of today’s biggest corporate buzzwords. They are often considered as separate values, but in reality they have much in common and in this article we will examine the areas of overlap and potential leverage benefits.
5 Great Ways to Ignite Your Team’s Energy
There are always periods when, as a manager, you might feel that your team members aren’t as productive as they could be, when their morale seems a little low or when they don’t seem as fully engaged with their work as you would like them to be. This can lead to them leaving the company if the situation becomes really bad, which costs the company both money and time spent either hiring a replacement or training a current employee to replace them.
Untapping Hidden Value: A New Partnership Model for Corporate Knowledge Management and Innovation Functions
In the current business environment, defined by some as the ‘Knowledge Age’, leadership interest is increasingly focused on Innovation and Knowledge Management development efforts. To date, these functions often operate along parallel, yet discrete, paths. As organizations seek new areas of growth, while further cutting costs there is an increasing need to build more effective partnerships in order to ensure ongoing success and drive additional business value.