Taking a Leaf Out of Your Childhood in Your Professional Life

The way we develop as children can greatly impact the way in which we conduct ourselves as adults. Our early experiences and discoveries have a significant influence on the growth of various personality traits, such as leadership, the ability to work as part of a team and communication, which can have a big impact on our professional lives.

10 Guidelines for Business Model Innovation in Established Companies

Leading CEOs worldwide expect major changes to their company’s business model until 2020. As a consequence, organizations are currently about to realize that, today, business model innovation has become as important as technological innovation. However, developing new and viable business models still represents a serious challenge for large incumbent firms despite their resources, know-how, and key technologies. This article provides 10 guidelines for mastering business model innovation challenges in established companies.

How to Avoid Robot-Zombie Innovation

In order to create Breakthrough Innovations, you need to abandon the corporate robot-zombie talk, says Andrew Benson. By cultivating an open and free form innovation culture organizations can avoid the idea logjams created by formal innovation processes.

Innovation is not always nice to have. Unless you play-to-win!

Because of today’s business hype for innovation we encounter situations where there can be too much of a good thing going on and successful companies tend to be aware of this potential pitfall. As much as a complete lack of innovation will lead to failure in an organization, left unmanaged, too many innovative ideas can cloud the judgement on which ideas are truly great. Innovation management therefore is crucial in the success of any organisation.

Elements of a Successful Innovation Roadmap

Countless articles argue: To remain competitive, companies need to consistently build their innovation portfolio. Value-oriented improvement and new developments must permeate the business. This article discusses a structured approach, known as a Rapid Innovation Cycle, which brings a repeatable process to innovation, empowering individuals to contribute more and organizations to look beyond themselves—all leading to a higher success rate.

Beyond Tech and Elusive Geniuses – The Everyday Innovation Heroes

Apple, Google and General Electric success stories centre on groundbreaking characters and geniuses. But 99% of companies worldwide are unlike any of these. Most organisations are made up of people like you and me: reasonably proficient in innovation management but surrounded by innovation agnostics. People who can share with us the tough, yet stirring mission of pushing boundaries to shape a bit of future.

Challenge Question Formation for Crowdsourcing

Organizations that pursue the inquiry-led form of collaborative innovation often have an outcome in mind. They may seek the “low-hanging fruit” of immediately actionable ideas. They may seek ideas that help to re-envision the business. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on how the savvy practitioner manages the challenge question formation process to help the sponsor achieve their desired goals. The key? Knowing how to dial up and dial back the level of transformation incumbent within each question.

In Pursuit of “Actionable” Ideas

Engagement matters on the front end of innovation. Tangible results matter on the back end. Organizations that pursue the practice of collaborative innovation seek, ultimately, actionable ideas: ideas whose implementation yields benefits.

Retrospective on the Dirty Maple Flooring Company

Our columnist Doug Collins began the Dirty Maple Flooring Company tale last fall. Twenty episodes later, the story in which Dirty Maple embraces collaborative innovation has come to an end.

The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 20

Chief strategist Charlie Bangbang has experienced the first evolution of his practice of collaborative innovation at Dirty Maple by applying the blueprint. What lessons does he take about innovation management? About crowdsourcing? About leadership?

Eight Important Facts about NPD and R&D Portfolio Management

Often the tasks at hand take our focus off of the big picture. In new product development (NPD) and R&D portfolio management, there are several “givens” that may seem obvious when stated but are often overlooked. Bring your attention back to these eight tried and true ways to improve your portfolio management and increase your product development productivity.

The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 19

How might we measure our practice of collaborative innovation? What story do we tell by the factors we identify and the indicators we track? Does the plot interest our audience?

The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 18

What might a virtuous circle of collaborative innovation look like? In this episode, our protagonists Charlie and Frankie review how the design of their practice reinforces itself from strategy to planning to execution to governance.

The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 17

In this episode, Charlie shares with Frankie a map for how the organization might track the ideas surfaced through the Idea Mill Program. Are all ideas created equally? How might we tie the right metrics to the right ideas?

Bringing Maturity to the Front-End: 5 Best Practices for Building Capability

Knowing the best practices to follow is key to avoiding the pitfalls in new product development (NPD) process integration. Whether you’re a ways down the path toward a mature architecture or just getting started, here are five tips gathered from 30+ years of helping product development organizations improve their productivity and mature their full architecture of NPD.