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.
How Thinking about your Business as a Collection of Franchises can Unleash Innovation
Fostering a sense of ownership among employees can unleash tremendous capacity for innovation, says Edward Glassman. Like franchisees, who own their independent businesses but operate within a well-defined structure or system, empowered employees tend to be more entrepreneurial and committed to helping the organization to thrive.
11 Dos and Don’ts for Small Group Ideation Sessions
There is a right way and a wrong way to run a brainstorm or ideation meeting. A little preparation pays dividends. It is very important to separate the two phases of the meeting, recommends Paul Sloane.
What the Self-Organizing Principles of Improv Theater can Teach Us About Business Creativity
Michelle James explores the fascinating connections between adhering to the principles of improvisational theater in a performance and being able to adapt, create and improvise effectively in the work place.
Ideas management: What if there are no ideas?
‘Innovation starts from the top’ is a frequently used phrase; but there are many steps involved in a successful innovation strategy. What unfortunately I too often see, and in many organizations, is a huge gap between top management thinking and the understanding in the rest of the organization about innovation. Everybody might agree that innovation is important in principle. They might even be in agreement about the particular process that could bring new ideas to fruition, and implement new thinking in an innovation. This is all fine – but what if there are no new ideas?
How to build balanced innovation teams
When building a team it is critical to first understand what the group is expected to deliver, then take a deeper look into who is selected and how they are expected to work together. Purposefully balancing the right type of people for the job will go a long way toward making the team more effective, productive, and successful.
How to Develop a Vision for Innovation
You cannot expect your team to be innovative if they do not know the direction in which they are headed, warns Paul Sloane.
Why management by consensus is killing innovation
One management issue that could be killing innovation efforts is an obsession by many managers that a decision can
People: The ‘raw materials’ of innovation
You can pick your raw materials for product you make but your innovation raw materials are your people. Understanding your people will improve your chance of innovation success.
How one company managed to kill creativity
A case history of a company that set out to encourage creativity and an analysis of why it didn't succeed.
Open Innovation: Why Mindset Matters Most
I have long argued that companies should look more at the people side of innovation rather than concentrating all their efforts on processes and concepts. The necessity of building trust as a basis for successful open innovation makes this even more relevant, and it also brings more power to the people who really drive innovation within a company.
3 key issues that can kill your innovation initiatives
Culture, Communication and Collaboration are the 3 C's that form the "soft-side" foundation of successful innovation. Without understanding your personnel "raw material" for innovation, the process may be difficult if not impossible to execute successfully.
5 techniques for tapping team creativity
Everyone has heard of "writers block," but what happens when creative blocks impede individual efforts and innovation work in organizations? Many of the strategies that apply to individuals can also be applied to group and organizational situations. Here are five ways that Geoff Brennan recommends to harness creativity and break your team's creative blocks.
To Spur Innovation, Break Down Internal Barriers
Within larger organizations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. Every organization has to find ways to promote internal communication and collaboration and to fight internal division and competition. Here are some ideas from Paul Sloane for breaking down barriers to communication.
Building an Effective Framework for Innovation
How do you turn innovation from a marketing concept into something tangible with an impact on the bottom line? There is of course no simple answer, and to succeed a different way of thinking and working is required
To Encourage the Flow of Ideas, Remember the Three Cs
While many companies give lip service to innovation, the fact is that your organization's managers may be unwittingly killing new ideas, along with the enthusiasm of the creative thinkers who developed them. Jeffrey Baumgartner provides some advice on how to ensure that managers are more supportive of new ideas.
10 Rules for Creative Teams
Under the right circumstances, a team can be significantly more creative than any individual team member and is often better able to push creative ideas through the implementation process so that they may become innovations. Here are ten quick rules for ensuring your teams are effective creative teams from Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Eight ways to generate more ideas in a group
Group brainstorming is common in organizations around the world. But more often than not, it delivers a disappointing quantity of so-so ideas. Here are eight ways to generate more and better ideas in these ideation sessions.