Unleashing Virtual Creative Collaboration at The Sonophilia Foundation: What Can a Nonprofit Teach Us About Virtual Creative Collaboration
Does creativity suffer in our virtual world, or could working virtually actually lead to more collaborative environments, better ideation and heightened interaction?
5 Tips to Drive Innovation in Your Small Business
It’s a fast-paced business world out there where innovation is the name of the game and a powerful tactic that ensures long-term success. After all, if your company is not innovating and reinventing its processes across the board, then you’re falling behind.
How to Encourage Employees to Have a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Having the right work-life balance is integral to maintaining one's health. A poor work-life balance can have serious ramifications, including chronic stress and burnout.
Innovate Like Famous Explorers
Innovation nowadays has many similarities with voyages of discovery in the past. In this blog Gijs van Wulfen walks us through practical learnings for innovation inspired by successful explorers.
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.
The Team Diversity Sweet Spot
Team diversity is conducive to innovation. When R&D project teams are composed of people with different skills, competencies and knowledge, the likelihood for new thinking and innovative solutions increase. However, too much diversity may lead to breakdown in communication and ensuing conflict. There is a sweet spot in how much diversity R&D teams should have.
How the Individual’s Groupthink Tendencies can Affect Innovation
What do attending a business lunch or going to Catholic Mass have to do with groupthink? Susanna Bill discusses the notion of groupthink and how experiencing something for the first time helps you snap out of it.
10 Tips for Successful Innovation Teams
Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. This article provides a collection of ten tips that serve as a talent management roadmap for growth companies in search of high-performance teams that deliver.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LIV: The Balancing Act
With Marlow's time heavily invested in one potentially big client, his colleagues have been picking up the slack on the other running innovation projects for months. Will Marlow's persistence and investment in the Accipiter project pay off for the firm?
The Bouillon Soup Lesson: You Cannot Innovate Alone
It is often in the commencement of one’s career that simple mistakes are made. Whether it’s a result of inexperience, blinding enthusiasm or fearlessness doesn’t really matter, as long as the lesson learned serves you, and others, well. Gijs van Wulfen shares a constructive experience from his first innovation position.
Measuring the Practice of Collaborative Innovation
Developing and supporting the practice of collaborative innovation takes time and money. What do we assess to weigh its value? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins proposes focusing on strategic alignment of the program, relative advantage of the ideas, and engagement of the community members.
The Idea Game Helps Teams ‘Battle’ to Produce the Best Ideas
The Idea Game is a new group brainstorming tool that corporate teams can use to generate fresh ideas and insights. Developed by Swedish creativity consulting firm Realize AB, it provides a variety of creative stimuli using a card deck and game board to generate ideas, and "idea battles" to help identify and improve upon the best ideas.
Learning by Doing
New forms of learning by doing seem to be emerging. Technology could play a role in finding innovative ways to enable skills development and greater understanding of personal actions, reactions and decisions.
How Human Behavior Can Skew Innovation
A variety of human group behaviors can undermine innovation. For best results, we need to be aware of them and mitigate those that can derail innovation efforts.
Engaging Collaborative Innovation’s Losers
Change benefits some more than others. The practice of collaborative innovation, which by design offers transformative change, is no different. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins advises campaign teams on engaging people who find themselves on the losing end of the practice. Ignoring their concerns jeopardizes the initiative.
Building World Class Innovation Programs
In the June issue of Harvard Business review, Intuit, the American software company, was labeled “a design-driven innovation machine.” InnovationManagement talked to Roy Rosin who was Intuit’s first innovation leader, building the company’s innovation programs and working with teams on creating new products and services.
Four Points to Consider as the Business Sponsor of an Ideation Challenge
Your organization holds you accountable for the profit or loss of one of its brands, channels, or regions. Maybe you oversee the business as a whole. You have an opportunity to apply collaborative innovation as a means to engage a wide swath of colleagues on resolving a critical business question with you. Should you proceed? If you do proceed, what points should you keep in mind to ensure you make productive use of your time and the time of your community members? In this article, community architect Doug Collins covers the four critical points to consider as the potential business sponsor of an ideation challenge.
25 Rules for a Perfect Brainstorm
There are numerous reasons why a brainstorm session can produce few great ideas or none at all. Gijs van Wulfen gives us his suggestions for the perfect brainstorm.
How to Communicate the Value of Idea Management
The success of an organization's idea management program is at the mercy of its supporters - the employees. The innovation team and top management must effectively communicate their goals to employees so they understand what's expected of them and feel confident that their ideas will be taken seriously. Enno Scholz walks us through this communication process.
Living Well: The Future of Health and Collaborative Open Innovation
Living Well Collaborative is a new player in the innovation game and a sign of what's to come – downstream innovation management by and on behalf of users, interacting with academics and industry, jointly, to fashion the future. Deborah Mills-Scofield tunes into Living Well..
How To Foster Greater Collaboration Between Innovators and the IT Department
Success in innovation requires greater collaboration with the corporate IT department, yet in many cases friction between the two leaves innovation managers with tools they don't want to use or IT managers with tools they can't support. How do you get this critical relationship right?
What is Lens Shifting and How Can it Help You Shape Your Innovation Strategy?
Measuring innovation is tough on most counts – unless you happen to be lucky enough to create new blockbuster products. One way to make strategy easier to frame and guide is to have a set of leading indicators telling you if your innovation efforts are working out. Deb Mills-Scofield looks at how to set up the lead indicator process through 'Lens Shifting'.
The Purposeful Entrepreneur
What makes an entrepreneur's decision making different from an executive's and can the two ever meet? We asked investor and start-up champion Tony Fish to explore entrepreneur vs. executive innovator as he prepares to launch a novel new digital collaborative incubator in London.
How to Create a Culture of Leadership (where everyone plays their part)
How do you create the right conditions for your co-workers to mutually reinforce their commitment to your goals? Doug Collins looks at the four cornerstones of that process and how you can go about fostering them in an innovative workplace.
Why Diversity is the Mother of Creativity
Diversity is the key to creativity. Not just diversity in your workforce, but in your personal life, the teams you form and the managers whom you hire and promote, explains Jeffrey Baumgartner.
How Partners React to an Open Innovation Strategy
I have cited Psion Teklogix, provider of rugged mobile computers, several times on my blog for their promising approach to open innovation. Last month, the company took a big step forward with its strategic interpretation of open innovation – called Open Source Mobility (OSM) – when it brought its global partners together for a series of conferences at which they unveiled a new platform designed to give resellers and developer partners the opportunity to co-create with Psion.
How to Leap over the Shortcomings of Traditional Group Brainstorming
Brainstorming can be effective if it is performed properly. In this article, Jeffrey Baumgartner explores some of the weaknesses of traditional brainstorming and explores several potentially fruitful alternatives.
15 Foundations for Facilitating Creativity in the Workplace
Here are lessons learned from 12 years of creative facilitation in business, from creativity expert Michelle James.