Bengt Järrehult

BENGT JÄRREHULT

Bengt Järrehult is Fellow Scientist Innovation at SCA, a global hygiene products and paper company. He is also adjunct professor and visiting professor resp. at 2 departments of Lund University in Sweden. He is an avid reader of and presenter on the topics of innovation, especially on breakthrough innovation and the psychological hurdles that exist to achieve this, hurdles that we may or may not be aware of. He is of the opinion that most companies more or less know what to do to become more innovative. What they don’t know is what really hinders them from doing these measures…

The Industrial Menopause and What to Do About It

It seems to be more or less a fact that the more mature a company is, the harder it is to produce something totally new that deviates substantially to what has been done earlier. In order to understand this phenomenon better Bengt Järrehult makes a comparison between human and industrial life, trying to elucidate the similarities and differences between the 2 worlds.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:17:41-07:00March 5th, 2014|Categories: Innovation Psychology, Open Innovation, Organization & Culture|Tags: Change Management, incremental innovation, innovation, Innovation Strategy, innovative companies, menopause|

Innovation and Personality Types

How come that upper middle managers and entrepreneurs look at things in different ways? The answer lies partly in their personality types. It is known that certain personality types work better in certain situations than other. This is also valid for the innovation area, as Bengt Järrehult describes below.

Ideascale2020-07-10T14:35:32-07:00December 12th, 2013|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: entrepreneurship, hbdi, innovation psychology, innovative people, mbti, personal development, personality types, s-curve|

The Importance of Stupid, Irrational Decisions

Summer is for relaxing, but also for reading books in more depth. During his vacation Bengt Järrehult read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow for the second time and more thoroughly. Here are Bengt’s thoughts on how Prospect Theory applies to innovation related decisions - the decisions that may seem stupid and irrational – but are they really?

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:14:49-07:00September 6th, 2013|Categories: Innovation Psychology, Organization & Culture|Tags: Daniel Kahneman, decision making, innovation, innovation psychology, prospect theory, risk aversion, risk management|

Cascading Change Versus Viral Change

“Everything has changed, even change has changed” is a proverb that is increasingly true. In this article Bengt Järrehult will describe the good old top-down or cascading approach compared to a more bottom-up or viral way.

Ideascale2021-12-05T17:09:59-08:00July 1st, 2013|Categories: Innovation Psychology, Organization & Culture|Tags: cascading change, Change Management, top-down, top-down innovation, Viral, viral change|

Getting Out of the Commodity Trap – Part II

The basics of Prospect Theory by Daniel Kahneman tell us that we hate to lose 3 times more than we love to win. This mindset, probably deeply engraved in our DNA, has implications on the way we develop and brand our products as we are more prone to reduce the drawbacks we have relative to our competitors rather than to improve our advantages. According to Bengt Järrehult this leads to commoditization.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:13:44-07:00March 12th, 2013|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: Best Practices, commodity trap, Competition, competitive advantage, competitive intelligence, in-depth article, self-organizing system, strengths and weaknesses|

Getting Out of the Commodity Trap – Part 1

Has your product lost competitive advantage? If your customers cannot differentiate your product from those of your competitors, most likely you have fallen into the “commodity trap”. The following article explores how this harmful phenomenon can be better understood and ultimately avoided by studying the dynamics within flocks of birds.

Ideascale2021-12-05T09:40:34-08:00February 26th, 2013|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: commodity trap, competitive advantage, competitive intelligence, Product Development, self-organizing system|

7 Ways to be Creative

When faced with the question “Are you creative?” I have found that only the half of the audiences I speak to consider themselves creative. This is true even when you talk to people that are supposed to be creative in developing products or market plans. As innovation is partly depending on guts to dare, something that comes from self-confidence, I think it is time that we stretch our old opinion on what creativity is all about – here are 7 different ways to be creative. I am sure you can find yourself described at least in a couple of them.

Ideascale2021-12-05T09:29:35-08:00January 15th, 2013|Categories: Idea Management, Innovation Psychology|Tags: Creativity, Ideation|

The Best Motivation for Innovation is ‘Being in Flow’

An important topic in Innovation Management is that of motivation. What kind of incentives can an organization provide to stimulate innovation? Bengt Järrehult argues that there is no such thing as extrinsic motivation and we should really concern ourselves with working in Flow.

Ideascale2021-12-05T08:41:41-08:00November 6th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: challenge, extrinsic, extrinsic motivation, flow, in-depth article, intrinsic, motivation, skills management|

Playing to Win Means Being Willing to Lose

Inspired by Susanna Bill’s post regarding the importance of vulnerability for innovation, I was reminded of an eye-opening story from the book Sway by the Brafman brothers. This story may explain why we retrospectively look at what we have done and ask ourselves “how could I be trapped like that?” It also applies to companies that have an ambidextrous innovation strategy that incorporates both the “play-to-win” approach and the far more common “play-not-to-lose” approach.

Ideascale2021-12-05T08:27:17-08:00October 9th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology, Strategies|Tags: IoT, psychology, risk management, risk-taking, strategy|

Threat vs. Opportunity – The Art of Pitching your Ideas

Why is your boss neglecting the fantastic idea you came up with even though it looks promising (in your eyes at least)? And why is your boss so intent on avoiding negative situations? This is an irritating behavior many of us have experienced and one that Bengt Järrehult examines more closely in today’s blog.

Ideascale2021-12-05T08:18:19-08:00September 11th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: Communication, objective state, presentation, prospect theory, risk aversion, risk management, subjective state|

Can Multi-tasking Result in More than 60% Longer Project Time?

You want to be perceived as a good innovation project member, to be appreciated for your achievements – and just to safeguard that notion some of what you do leads to a success in time – you do multiple projects in parallel. But is this really efficient and effective? Check out Bengt Järrehult’s somewhat mathematical look at multi-tasking, where the exercise of putting numbers in leads to a result that may surprise you.

Ideascale2021-12-03T14:42:00-08:00August 14th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: Best Practices, multi-tasking, multitasking, productivity, project management, talent management, time management|

How to Change Innovation Culture the Fast & Viral Way

There are different approaches to facilitating cultural change within an organization in order to promote innovation. Bengt Järrehult argues that the viral change, whereby successful changes are achieved through experimentation and then spread by different groups copying or adopting the change leads to faster and more long-lasting culture change.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:11:40-07:00July 17th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology, Organization & Culture|Tags: Change Management, company culture, Innovation Culture, leadership, psychology|

Innovation and the Art of Riding an Elephant

In trying to understand why we act in a predictably irrational ways, for example choosing short-term instead of long-term rewards, Bengt Järrehult uses the metaphor of the mahout and elephant to depict the different parts of the human brain and it's processes. In an innovation effort, how can you direct the mahout and motivate the elephant?

Ideascale2021-12-03T11:27:45-08:00June 22nd, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: Creativity, innovation psychology, leadership, motivation, psychology|

The Eternal Battle Between Important & Urgent – Can be Solved

Do you often find yourself procrastinating on important, yet non-urgent matters in order to take care of the stuff that needs immediate attention? This all-too-common circumstance also takes place on a larger scale. Bengt Järrehult walks us though how to deal with the incremental and breakthrough projects at the same time

Ideascale2021-12-03T07:09:18-08:00April 25th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: breakthrough innovation, efficiency, incremental innovation, incubators, prioritization, procrastination, psychology|

The Innovation Knowing-Doing Gap

If you scrutinize the theories on innovation they seem to conclude for example, that ambidextrous organizations are best at handling incremental innovations rather than radical, and if we would focus more on learning, experimental organizations we would be better off… So why don’t we act accordingly? Bengt Järrehult takes a closer look at the reasons why we act against better knowing regarding innovation.

Ideascale2021-12-02T18:16:58-08:00March 27th, 2012|Categories: Innovation Psychology|Tags: Best Practices, Competition, innovation data, innovation obstacles, learning by doing, psychology|