On your path towards success, your business will encounter numerous bumps, however, some of these problems tend to hold your business more than others. Most of the time, the entrepreneurs behind these SMBs are first-timers, which means that they lack the necessary experience to recognize the gravity of the situation in the given moment.
You may be the mastermind behind the business idea that has led to establishing your company, but your employees are the backbone of its success. No brand, no matter how necessary it may be, is immune to failure caused by poor internal structure and leadership.
Last month, leaders in public sector innovation gathered to discuss ways of crowdsourcing new solutions to longstanding problems at IdeaScale’s Open Nation DC. Speakers from a range of agencies as diverse as the FDA and the US Coast Guard presented best practices on creating actionable change in government.
Managing innovation is a big role that puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of management teams. Depending on how much a company cultivates an innovative culture and environment, innovative ideas either go through chains of command, or are workshopped in specific departments.
Conformity may be overrated. Most innovators really do "think different." Learn to spot them, and what they can teach us!
Innovation can’t happen without education and inspiration. Stagnation is the absence of creativity, and far too many teams aren’t using education as a way to keep the fresh and creative ideas flowing.
Many companies around America struggle with communication between the management, the employees, and every level for that matter. Unfortunately, bad communication can lead to lower production and even conflict within the company, squandering sales and hurting reputation.
Are your employees underperforming? This happens even to star employees when they don’t feel motivated to do their job anymore. Luckily, great managers can drive employee engagement by reconnecting with their workers. To boost engagement, you must find out what drives the people to do their best job every day.
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.
The more you allow disparate ideas to mingle and collide, the more you maximize your chances for true innovative thought to emerge. Learn all of this and more in a complimentary white paper about why innovators want to nurture workforce diversity.
The legacy approach to talent selection involves matching education, length of experience and functional skills to the role. All of this makes sense as a baseline, and for well-established professions. But, we argue, selecting talent for innovation requires a whole new approach. Companies must recognize specific innovation skills that drive business outcomes. Yet today, most lack the tools to do so.
Surveys show that the large majority of senior executives see innovation as critical for their businesses but what if you want to make your organization more agile and innovative where should you start? You could launch a big initiative with grand statements, training classes and an ideas scheme but you tried all those last year and they fizzled out. It is better to begin with a brutally honest assessment of what is preventing innovation from happening today.
Globalization is great for business: it opens up new markets and allows businesses to bring in revenue and talent from all over the world. However, the first steps into international expansion can be fraught with growing pains, forcing companies to waste time and money on efforts that don’t gain any traction in foreign markets. To avoid this, company leaders have to get ready to embrace change and innovation outside their normal comfort zone. Here’s why it’s important to get comfortable with discomfort when you’re considering international expansion.
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.
What should a roadmap that helps you develop corporate innovation capabilities look like? How do you bring new thoughts and approaches together with current and past initiatives (both successes and failures) and turn this into a single framework? How do you keep pushing and developing your organization to become more flexible and agile without losing out on the current overall efforts and expected results?