Innovators, How Do You Find Your Next Problem to Solve?
If you’re working in innovation there’s nothing as rewarding as making the long journey from inspiration to implementation.
Considering International Expansion? Get Ready To Think Outside Your Comfort Zone
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.
10 Skills You Need to Nurture in Your Innovation Group
Organizational innovation requires discipline. And like any other discipline, it requires monitoring and training to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of your capabilities. But what skills should you focus on building and how can you track your progress?
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.
Launching an Innovation Program: What You Don’t Know
Although innovation programs are becoming more and more embedded within the enterprise, it is still very common to find organizations that are just starting to experiment with formal, continuous innovation programs. Many IdeaScale clients that come to us are quietly launching pilot programs as proof-of-concept initiatives that will confirm innovation value for senior leadership.
The Seven Essential Characteristics of Innovative Companies
What makes a company innovative? Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. It should not simply be a slogan, nor an end unto itself, argues Jeffrey Baumgartner. To be truly innovative, an organization should have seven essential characteristics.
Creativity: Why it’s Better to Turn your Problems into Goals
When it comes to creative problem solving, which is more effective? Focusing on the problem at hand, or on setting goals for what we'd like to accomplish? Jeffrey Baumgartner explores this perplexing question and comes to a very clear conclusion.
Why is Innovation so Often “Hit or Miss?”
This question has baffled many executives for quite some time. Management tries to replicate the special event or circumstances that created a successful innovation project but often fails. Companies have created positions such as Chief Innovation officer, innovation teams, and organizational strategies that promote innovation through diversity, team dynamics, and social networking. However, failure rates of 90% are common when innovations occur due purely to chance. What distinguishes whether an innovation is hit or miss?
Governance in the Context of the Innovation Blueprint
What does governing the practice of collaborative innovation mean? When we govern do we compromise the spirit of openness and experimentation that enlivens the practice? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins applies the blueprint for collaborative innovation to explore these critical questions. His view? Governance is guidance: helping people work to their potential.
How to Design a Provocative Creative Challenge
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Bringing Your Balanced Scorecard Alive with Collaborative Innovation
Robert Kaplan and David Norton popularized the Balanced Scorecard twenty years ago. Its simple, visual framework helps organizations depict linked sets of goals that define strategy. Today, with new mindsets, practices, and technologies, people have more opportunities to engage in helping their organizations envision the future. The scorecard, however, can at times seem like an Easter Island statue, offering mute, impenetrable witness to firm performance. In this article Doug Collins explores opportunities for people to bring alive the scorecard by applying the practice of collaborative innovation.
Action Plan for Rapid Innovation – Part 2
At Orange, the international mobile and fixed carrier issued from France Telecom, there is a strategy to diversify the services it offers to its users and has set up Orange Vallée as an external entity to drive innovation. Nicolas Bry tells us more about how the system works.
To Focus Employees on Innovation, Align Their Goals and Compensation
The ability to deliver new value requires systemic evolution in business strategy, culture, organizational design, and customer awareness. Employees can and will deliver new customer value, but the way they are paid and directed must change first and then the results will follow.
10 Steps for Boosting your Firm’s Innovation
Here are 10 steps you can take to turn your company into an innovation leader that races forwardswith new products, services and improved processes while your competitors remain far behind with outdated products, limited services and inefficient processes.
3 ways to assess your organization’s innovation health
For innovation to thrive in an organization, three conditions must be present. If any one of them is suffering, then innovation will likewise suffer. Here is what to look for to assess your own organization's level of innovation health.