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.
As a company grows, its creativity typically tends to decrease. What can be done to prevent a decrease in creativity within an organization?
As the global economy continues its gradual recovery, companies want entrepreneurial ideas that spur growth. Oftentimes though we see a gap between what entrepreneurially-minded employees think about and what the companies that employ them want.
How come that upper middle managers and entrepreneurs look at things in different ways? The answer lies partly in their personality types. It is known that certain personality types work better in certain situations than other. This is also valid for the innovation area, as Bengt Järrehult describes below.
You would be hard-pressed to find a business leader who would question the importance of innovation not only to promote growth within their organization, but also to ensure its very survival. These business leaders have invested significantly in their innovation initiatives to support this importance. Yet a 2012 Accenture study found that more than half of corporate executives were disappointed by their innovation results and returns from their innovation investments.
The analyses and stories told about Amundsen and Scott’s fascinating and epic race to the South Pole are numerous. In this article I will try to make sense of the race in relation to the lessons derived in view of companies entering the white space[1] or aspiring to succeed with disruptive innovations. The lessons begin from using the holistic innovation management framework the Innovation Radar (IR) published in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2006[2].
How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? The answer is by deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. There are dominant ideas in every field. The innovative thinker purposefully challenges those dominant ideas in order to conceive new possibilities, explains Paul Sloane.
A short case history that demonstrates the catastrophe that can result when technically and commercially superior innovations are ignored because of the desire to remain within the boundaries of a company patent.
Blogger Stefan Lindegaard recently threw down a challenge to innovation practitioners: Where are people in your innovation processes? Here are some of the many ways you can focus on the people part of your innovation initiatives.
Questions are the best way to gain deeper insights and develop more innovative solutions. So why do so few people utilize them, asks Paul Sloane?
In his new book, Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation, Jean-Philippe Deschamps explains that innovation leaders are unique and rare individuals who must possess a unique set of seemingly opposed characteristics.
Every time that we approach a problem, in any walk of life, we bring to bear assumptions that limit our ability to conceive fresh solutions, warns Paul Sloane. Brilliant thinkers are always aware of assumptions and are always happy to confront them.
To be successful, innovative leaders need to have the characteristics of both arsonists and fire fighters, according to author Paul Sloane. Read on to learn how this apparent dichotomy is possible, and what it means for you as a leader in your organization.
