How Can Enterprises Think and Execute Like a Startup?
Around the world and across industries, enterprises are facing tremendous market upheaval. Transformation and disruption were the new normal well before the pandemic, but the coronavirus crisis accelerated certain trends toward innovation and digitization and led to the fundamental rewiring of old business models.
Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!
In a time when uncertainty reigns, the fear of being disrupted can brutally hurt any business. Responsible leaders who dare to anticipate disruption and take steps to self-inflict it to their organization in a smart and controlled way are best positioned for the future.
Validate Your Pivot with Innovation
When planning or navigating a pivot, how do you know if you are pivoting in the right direction? Answer simple questions to validate your pivot and execute on four actions to help create speed-to-market.
The Top Practices That Separate Great Leaders From The Rest
How do great leaders separate themselves from the rest? This article will examine how several excellent leaders, including Rich Teerlink and Steve Jobs, were able to inspire their teams, develop incredible products, and transform their companies.
The Key Steps Innovation Professionals Should Take in a COVID-19 Environment
Obviously COVID-19 is having an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, with the scope and scale of business disruption being immense and incredibly challenging. But disruption is what innovation people are generally excellent at responding to, so the question becomes - “how do you and your team support your organisations within this environment?”
How Frontline Employees Drive the Change Management Process
Organizational change can be met with resistance, especially if it excludes employee input.
Six Questions Every Leader Must Answer – If They Want to Lead Change
If you want to lead a transformation in the business, then you have to sell the idea over and over again to people throughout the organisation. In particular, the leader has to answer these questions which are present in people’s minds even if they are unspoken.
Five Perspectives of Innovation Management Maturity
The success of innovation management is never an accident; it’s a holistic management process with an iterative thought-out planning and execution continuum.
Tips for Established Businesses to Survive the Startup Surge
So much has already been said about what smaller, fresh companies need to do in order to gain a competitive edge in a well-developed market, but how often do you think about what those well-established businesses should do to achieve the same?
Leading Innovation within Government Agencies: What to Drive and What to Avoid
As innovation professionals, we too often look for inspiration from organizations such as Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Spotify, Google, etc. Cultures within these businesses are encourage transparency, experimentation and autonomy resulting in engaged workforce of the best and brightest minds, pumping out game changing products on-schedule, on-budget and on-point. We want that for the organizations that we support. We want to drive those behaviors.
The Role of Innovators at Large Organizations
In-house innovation programs continue to proliferate and our concept of the innovator has evolved alongside them. Now we no longer think of a creative genius sitting alone in their tower coming up with creative ideas. Now, innovators can play a number of different roles within an innovation program beyond idea author. A lot of interest and attention is being paid to this concept, because organizations that are looking to sponsor and train innovation skills at their organization need to understand what skills matter most when it comes to creating meaningful change. After all, it’s an important part of professional development nowadays. Every employee at any organization needs to be able to keep up with the rapid pace of change. So here are a few of the roles that innovators play at large organizations.
Musings of an Apprentice: Business Thinking Meets Design Thinking to Create a Design-led company
Abstract: A perspective of a redesigned, reformed and transformed business design professional. The author shares her journey, experience, progress, and point of view on today's often discussed "design thinking or building a design-led innovation culture."
5 Ways to Create a Culture That Embraces and Adapts to Change
As part of today’s changing technological landscape, it is vital to create a workplace culture that adapts to those changes. Doing so starts with having a comfortable workplace culture to begin with. Making your employees feel at ease in their current working conditions is the basis of creating a workplace that can adapt to changes.
Impact Assessment: The Innovation Paradigm Shift that is Coming
In the context of business management and economics, innovation has mainly been considered as a source of profit and growth. But innovation can also have a transformative role and recently more and more innovators and entrepreneurs are not only considering the financial returns of their projects, but also the societal impacts that they might bring with them.
How to Drive More Innovation In Your Workforce
Let’s face it, creativity separates humans from the rest of the animals. Our species has opposable thumbs and with that, it seems, the inborn drive and ability to alter our environment. No wonder the topic of innovation ability provokes such primal emotions. Yet — like speed, intelligence or artistic talent — innovation talent is NOT distributed evenly across humanity. Given this truth, what is the best approach to driving more innovation in your workforce?
Innovation Simplified
Organizations rely on innovations to sustain competitiveness. Managers often talk about innovations. Some use it as an ornament. Perhaps innovation is the mostly abused word by organizations and practicing managers. There are dozens of definitions for the word innovation.
Want to Build a Culture of Innovation? Then Seek Out Your Innovation Agents
‘No man is an island, entire of itself’ runs the saying and it should probably go on to say that no concept should be introduced in isolation either. In the VUCA world, we’re all challenged with constantly trying to do something new, to create lasting change, transformation and disruption. That challenge means it helps to have others on your side, adding their enthusiasm, energy, perspective and creativity to the mix. Why… because if there’s one truth about innovation, it’s that it’s definitely not a solo sport!
Lean Start-Up and Digital Skills: Are They Enough?
If you’re like a lot of people, your company is trying to drive innovation internally, with a workforce that wasn't really hired for that. It's a tough nut to crack, and the very reason we started Swarm Vision.
As Corporate Innovation Evolves, Past Lessons Are Being Ignored
This article provides a personal perspective to the ongoing evolution of corporate innovation efforts, along with an overview of how some past mistakes are being repeated.
6 Reasons Some People Are Uncomfortable with Innovation
When we talk about innovation, we sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the new and revolutionary. Some people would rather stick to their same schedule and do the same thing, day after day: a predictable and comforting routine. For champions of innovation, this mindset is difficult to understand. However, you’re likely to meet many people over the course of your career who are simply uncomfortable with innovation, and you will have to learn to work with them. The first step to compromise is understanding, so let’s take a look at some of the reasons people are sometimes uncomfortable with innovation.
Why Running After Perfection can Kill Your Projects
Running after perfection can hinder your project’s success, despite your best intentions and efforts. Generally speaking, your project scope must align with its time and budget - a rule that doesn’t play well with the pursuit of perfection from start to finish. In this article, we’ll look at why perfection shouldn’t be your ultimate goal - but how to still satisfy your inner perfectionist as a project manager.
Deciphering Innovator Archetypes with Tamara Kleinberg of LaunchStreet
In this episode we are joined by Tamara Kleinberg, serial innovator, keynote speaker, creator the Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) Assessment and founder of LaunchStreet, a leading platform for individuals and organisations seeking to innovate. A few topics covered include lessons Tamara has learnt throughout her 20-year career advising companies such as Disney, General Mills, RICOH, P&G, J&J on how to create innovative cultures; why she so firmly believes that everyone has the possibility to be an innovator and the implications of this for leadership in large, established organisations; and walking through Tamara’s IQE Assessment the only tool designed to decipher a person’s natural innovative strengths and create the right environment for them to thrive.
The Eight Attributes of Bottom-Up Innovation Leaders
Bottom-up innovation is fueled by many ideas initiated by employees, as opposed to top-down innovation, which is fueled by a strong vision - often by the company’s founder. Bottom-up innovation leaders are entrepreneurial, supported by management’s emphasis on creativity and a can-do culture, and often share these eight attributes.
Intrapreneurial Success: Leading Disruption, Managing Change
Embracing an intrapreneurial mindset, which intentionally disrupts things from the inside out and often from the bottom up, is a radical concept for companies that thrive on stability and predictability. However, if an enterprise is committed to developing its innovation capability through intrapreneurship, three groups of people must be mobilized to make it happen: leadership, stakeholders, and innovation support.
The Future of Civic Engagement and Innovation
Numerous leaders and community organizers have been talking about public service lately, especially in the US - mostly encouraging the public to take place in ongoing dialogues and to volunteer in their communities in order to create positive change at local and national levels.
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?
Innovators: Are You Smart Enough For 2017?
We can all see that global commerce has evolved, innovative excellence has advanced and entrepreneurialism has accelerated. Just to make things more interesting, all of this change happened extremely rapidly. But how about our own intelligence? Are we really smart enough for 2017 and beyond? Ambition encourages us to reach for success, so let’s test our own entrepreneurial intelligence to see if we’re up to the challenges of 2017.
4 Things to Think About When Creating Your Innovation Roadmap
This time of year is full of meetings with leadership and teams in order to help them prepare for the year ahead. People discuss financial goals, sustainability goals, profitability targets, customer success metrics, and more, but there are also numerous research & development teams out there who are coordinating their annual innovation strategy who struggle in their process to create a cohesive innovation strategy.