Can Everyone Be Innovative?
Innovation is an integral part of many organizations today, and for good reason: it helps companies stay agile, relevant, and evolving. However, innovation is often difficult to achieve—or is even met with resistance.
Is Your Team Proficient in the 3 Cs of Innovation?
When leaders foster a culture of innovation, they enable their teams to be creative, flexible problem-solvers who thrive in the face of change. But what is a culture of innovation? And how does a leader begin to foster one? Building a culture of innovation originates with embracing The 3 Cs: critical thinking, curiosity, and customer-centric design.
You’re Stifling Innovation, And You Don’t Even Know It
It is a common belief that encouraging creativity will lead to higher levels of innovation. In actuality, most organizations already have the creative ideas they need. But they are missing or outright rejecting them, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
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.
How Open Innovation Can Be Used in the Financial Sector
In a recent article, The Financial Brand discussed the biggest threats to the financial and banking industry. They included a long list of everything from profitability to making good hiring decisions. However, we thought that there were a few problems that could be particularly fruitful when applied to open innovation systems.
9 Ways to Convert Employees into Intrapreneurs
Companies that encourage and reward intrapreneurship have a great advantage when it comes to retaining the best talents - especially important in today’s creative climate. Here are a few ways that your company can turn your employees into highly-engaged intrepreneurs.
Ways to Exercise Your Creative Muscles
Feeling like you’re stuck in a creative rut? Creativity works a lot like a muscle—you have to exercise it for it to work properly. Once you get stuck in a cycle of routine, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost your creativity. Maybe you’re not contributing innovative ideas during team meetings anymore, or maybe you just feel like you’re doing the same thing every single day. Whatever is making you feel uncreative, you don’t have to live with it. All it means is that it’s time to exercise your creative muscles more than you have been! Here are some ways you can stay sharp, innovative, and creative.
Optimizing Meetings to Maximize Individual Brainstorming Time
Are you overwhelmed by unnecessary meetings? We’ve all been there: one more meeting, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You’ve been trying to make some real progress on your creative project, but the constant meetings have really been cutting into your individual brainstorming time. If you feel like the number of meetings you’ve been attending is cutting into your productivity, you’re not imagining it.
Organizational Revolutions through Idea Hacking
Businesses face the dilemma dividing resources between protecting the current value chain and developing new value propositions that in time replace the old ones. Not every organization has the luxury to have its own dedicated innovation unit and still then the ideas might not always be too innovative. Hackathons are an affordable and energizing way to generate innovative ideas that can revolutionize your organization.
How Neuroscience is Supporting Innovative Corporations
Progressive business leaders are building innovative actions, climates and ultimately cultures that align with “brain-friendly” science. In this article we outline some steps that you can take to support this kind of innovative organization.
A Look Back at Three Innovations that Have Changed Our Lives
Nowadays, the words “innovation” and “creativity” get thrown around a lot in the business and academic world. But the road to making successful innovations is filled with challenges, opportunities taken or missed, and plenty strikes of luck. Often, people invent machines to face a recurrent problem. These inventions, in turn, spawn other inventions and innovation. These types of inventions have the most impact on society. Here’s looking at three inventions that have changed our lives forever.
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.
Exploring the Power of Pause with Leadership Thought-Leader & Korn Ferry Senior Partner Kevin Cashman
In today’s episode of the Innovation Ecosystem podcast, Kevin Cashman discusses with Mark the rationale and research behind "The Pause Principle," which aligns strongly with the notion of “creating space” explored by previous guests like David Allen, Lisa Bodell and Heiko Fischer, among others; about Kevin’s new interest in the concept of “story mastery”; and finally some fresh insights into the qualities of a great versus a good leader.
Making Innovation More of a Science And Less of an Art
One of the greatest challenges facing innovation professionals is to find the right approach to a given innovation problem. Whether that’s instilling the innovation mojo in a large corporation or simply helping teams become more innovative, the ways to do this seem to be more of an art than a science. However, during the last ten years there has been a strong push to turn this art form into more of a science.
5 Reasons Sustainability Drives Innovation
Sustainability is one of the key emerging trends in recent years. But much like innovation, it is a maturing discipline with few established business practices and lots of evolving methodologies. Sustainability champions at organizations often face the same challenges that innovation champions do: lack of senior level buy-in, lack of process, lack of resources. The benefits of successful sustainability and successful innovation are similar, as well: a competitive advantage, improved profit margins, and better brand sentiment from employees and customers.