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.
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.
Suppose you are a professional soccer player, chosen to kick the penalties for your team. And you scored only one out of seven penalties. Would you be satisfied? How long do you think your trainer and fellow players let you take penalties? They would probably kick you out of the team after the second failure in a row.
People who practice collaborative innovation learn how to craft a series of engagements where participants can see the whole—the whole problem and the whole set of potential solutions—in order to reach a shared understanding of the way forward. In articulating the way forward, idea by idea, the group commits to a larger strategic intent. In this article, I describe a way in which practitioners can craft an engagement in which participants can reach a shared understanding of which ideas to pursue from the front to the back end of innovation.
Very often the best way to innovate is to borrow someone else’s idea and apply it in your business. A successful innovation does not have to be an all-new invention. It just has to be something new to your business that is beneficial, explains Paul Sloane.
Truly innovative companies do not aim to be innovative. Rather they relentlessly strive to follow a unique strategy, says Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Is innovation a numbers game? We’ve all heard the statistics around the number of ideas it takes to eventually lead to a single successful product. But if we look at why it takes 3000 to 6000 or more ideas to find a single winning concept, the answer becomes fairly obvious: not every idea is a good idea. Mark Atkins explores how we can create better ideas, not more ideas.
The practice of collaborative innovation opens the door to meaningfully transforming the ways in which people engage with one another as they pursue the critical questions facing the organization. Understanding the extent to which people continue to use incumbent means of collaboration can help you to understand the extent to which they have embraced the practice. In this article Doug Collins suggests having a look at our old friend, e-mail.
It used to be that "systems thinking" was a specialty reserved for a select few intellectuals. Now that it's clear every element of our work is part of a larger system that visibly and invisibly shapes our individual and organizational opportunities and risks, it's time for all us, and especially those looking towards innovation, to become systems thinkers. Why? Understanding system dynamics provides insights into where innovation will have a high payback, explains Kay Plantes.
Product innovation is about developing and delivering the “next” product or service-to-market quickly and cost-effectively. A well-managed innovation process that meets customer demands for new and unique products and services can contribute to creating a competitive advantage and business growth. Organizations can improve their innovation processes through the use of next-generation social technologies, says Catherine Constantinides.
In their desperation to be innovative, companies often brainstorm themselves into idea overload, generating ideas that ultimately are failures. But what if companies could focus those brainstorming efforts and develop an efficient, targeted process for creativity? InnovationManagement asked Tony Ulwick to share his thoughts on how to leverage the creativity and get a better outcome.
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.
Most ideation activities result in the generation of a number of ideas. However, in most cases, only one idea – or a collection of ideas combined into one bigger idea – will actually be implemented. This does not mean that any one of the solutions is actually the right solution. Only that one solution is chosen. Unfortunately, the designers of many an innovation initiative fail to consider this simple fact. As a result, the chosen idea is often not in the best interest of the individual or the organisation running the initiative. Worse, in many cases no idea is ever implemented.
Innovation, the act of creating novelty, has become omnipresent whereas what we really need to know is how to change enterprises, how to transform them, how to make them Elastic Enterprises, urges Haydn Shaughnessy in this provocative article.
Are you effectively using the creative potential of your employees, customers and partners to address your innovation challenges? Collaborative idea management is a method to learn from the “wisdom of the crowd” in order to drive innovation. This in-depth article gives you an introduction including best practice from how Ericsson, the global telecom company worked with introducing and designing a successful collaborative idea management system.
