Small Business is Getting Bigger: How to Keep Innovating as Your Company Grows

Business innovation benefits business owners and consumers alike. It helps grow competitive advantage in saturated markets and time and time again have proven to be financially lucrative and socially inspiring. It's crucial to any organization's long-term success and especially hard to scale and maintain.

4 Stages for Innovation Refinement

If you’re in charge of innovation, it means that you’re constantly being surprised. Not just because technology and trends are emerging that are impacting your business in new and unexpected ways, but almost every project that you’re working on continues to evolve and improve over time.

Innovation and Process Automation for Small Businesses

In the world of small businesses, there are only three golden rules you need to keep in mind:

The Value of Innovation at a Time of Crisis

We often talk about the role of innovation in an age of constant, radical disruption, as defined by the 4th industrial revolution. Within this new environment, innovation leaders should play an essential role in helping the organization thrive and drive growth.

Improving Communication for a More United Workforce

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.

How to Keep Your Employees from Losing their Creativity

The most successful businesses and corporations in the world place employee satisfaction on the same pedestal as customer satisfaction. These corporations understand that without a loyal, creative, and cohesive team of satisfied employees, success cannot be attained.

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.

Trends in Innovation Leaders: Greater Risk and Big Bets

The latest Innovation Leaders research shows that there is an increasing number of high-growth companies that are prepared to take greater risk and make big bets. Rather than focus just on incremental growth, they are being bolder and are seeking to develop more radical innovation opportunities. Despite requiring significant investment and offering no guarantee of success this approach has been transformational for some. Where and why is this happening and what has changed that has made this approach more common?

12 Tips for New Business Owners in the First 12 Months of Their Company’s Life

If you are starting a new business you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of decisions you need to make. You may wonder what secret tricks successful business owners used to ensure that their companies grew in the right direction. Here are twelve tips that you should use in your first twelve months in order to make sure that your company has the best chance to succeed.

New Growth Opportunities Through Strategic Innovation and Business Design Thinking

All successful companies must eventually answer the same basic question: How do you establish new growth strategies and business opportunities from within your organization? The new book, The Art of Opportunity was written to help your business answer that question. The concepts were cultivated through more than 20 years of academic research and experience, providing organizations with a detailed blueprint for how to grow, innovate, and transform.

Rethinking The Way We Generate Insights

Identifying new sources of growth has become increasingly more complex given the myriad of alternatives that new business models, strategic partnerships, advanced technologies, and other disruptive mechanisms offer us. Taking a systematic approach to finding these opportunities means veering from our usual mode of operations to a much more speculative mindset where the learning journey is as important as the destination itself.

A paradigm shift for SMEs: Leveraging Sustainability as a Driver for Innovation

SMEs have sustainability on their radar. Their main goal is economic sustainability. To achieve this goal, they can take ecological and social sustainability as an opportunity for innovation instead of just considering it as a mere cost driver. Thus innovation and sustainability become the two sides of the coin called profitable growth.

Innovators Talk Strategy for Driving Growth

As innovation leaders in industry gather to discuss the front and back end of innovation in a global context, a common theme emerges. Whether expanding to a neighboring country or across oceans, entering a foreign market is always a “beyond-the-core” activity requiring the development of new competencies. One solution: identify skills first, not people.

Innovation’s Silent Killer

If they want to compete successfully in the future, companies should hold off on rapid ideation and faster commercialization until they take an unflinching look at what is truly stifling breakthrough innovation. In this article, Soren Kristensen provides insight on how honest self-reflection can free you from your biggest impediment to growth.

Moving from the Front to the Back End of Innovation: Idea Evaluation

People who practice collaborative innovation learn how to craft a series of engagements where participants can see the whole—the whole problem and the whole set of potential solutions—in order to reach a shared understanding of the way forward. In articulating the way forward, idea by idea, the group commits to a larger strategic intent. In this article, I describe a way in which practitioners can craft an engagement in which participants can reach a shared understanding of which ideas to pursue from the front to the back end of innovation.