Why You Should Embrace Creativity Within Your Culture
As a company grows, its creativity typically tends to decrease. What can be done to prevent a decrease in creativity within an organization?
Leadership’s Influence Company’s Culture
A company will always follow its leaders, but what influence do they play on the company culture?
Ten Ways to Motivate Employees to be More Innovative
You love your employees, and, obviously, you think they do awesome work, or else you probably wouldn’t have hired them. Yet, do you ever find yourself wishing they could become a little bit more innovative? After all, the companies that are thriving in today’s competitive marketplace are also some of the most creative.
‘Borrow’ Business Models to Reinvent Your Industry
Most “new” business models are not really “new”. Very frequently they are based on replications or re-combinations of existing business model patterns. Consequently, learning from business models from other companies and industries is a very important source of inspiration for business model innovation.
Innovation: An Outside-In Approach
Every organization wants to be thought of as “innovative” and although cliché, there is something said about thinking outside of the box to help you get there. However, simply asking your employees to think outside of the box at your next internal planning session or brainstorm meeting may not be enough to get to those game-changing ideas. To get unique solutions, you need to look at things in new light. The following seven strategies are tactics that will help you take an outside-in approach to innovation, to help you come up with unexpected, richer solutions.
Disappointed By Innovation Results? It’s The Culture!
Though companies invest into innovation they like results less and less. There seems to be a glass ceiling for driving innovation, which neither new tools and processes nor innovation consultants seem to crack. It is time to face the elephant in the room: company culture and its impact on innovation performance. Top management needs to learn deal with it. Then company culture will become a driver of innovation rather than getting in the way.
Thinking Like a Designer
Thinking like a designer can transform the way you approach the world when imagining and creating new solutions for the future. It’s about being aware of the world around you, believing that you play a role in shaping that world, and taking action toward a more desirable future. In my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’ I describe the five characteristics necessary to think like a designer.
5 Key Points to Consider when Developing an Innovation Strategy
From our talks with innovation management practitioners and business executives it seems that not many organizations have a well-defined and integrated innovation strategy. To find out more about how to go about creating and executing such a strategy, we spoke to Wouter Koetzier and Christopher Schorling at Acceture who encourage a very pragmatic and execution-oriented approach.
How To Get Anti-Innovators Up and Running?
In every organization you have anti-innovators. They are stuck in their habits; are ignorant the world is changing fast and think that they have nothing to fear. Actually, they are quite human. We all love our habits. Gijs van Wulfen explains how to get them motivated.
Implementing Ideas: Baby Steps
Big, crazy, breakthrough ideas seem wonderful when you are dreaming them up, but frightening when it comes time to implement them. Fortunately, the field personal development has a technique that you can apply: personal development planning (PDP). Jeffrey Baumgartner explains how to implement this approach to your innovation process.
Look Beyond Given Truths to Find Innovative Thinking
Are you in a “more of the same mode” in your innovation work? In this article Susanna Bill uses two real-life examples to remind us of the need to see beyond given truths. We need to keep our eyes and ears open for the triggers presented by others. She also returns to a “golden-oldie” exercise to put ourselves off balance and open up our thinking for new opportunities.
In Loving Memory of Traditional Strategy
Traditional Strategy, the dominant model of doing business for nearly half a century, is fast becoming a thing of the past, pushed aside by the fast-moving forces of social business - which include innovation, collaboration and co-creation.
Why Managers Fear Innovation
Innovation is a paradox for management. On the one hand you are well aware that you have to take new roads before you reach the end of the present dead end street. On the other hand it is risky. It takes a lot of time. And it takes a lot of resources. Research shows that only one out of seven innovation projects is successful. So saying yes to innovation is a step into the unknown. It creates fear of failure, which causes fear to innovate. It's like sailing to the South Pole like Shackleton, where the surrounding ice can stop you any moment.
Innovators Prepare like Roald Amundsen
The race for the South Pole was a big event at the beginning of the twentieth century. Roald Amundsen was described as practical, pragmatic and ruthlessly ambitious. As a child Amundsen dreamed of being a polar explorer. In this article Gijs van Wulfen looks at his story as a source of inspiration for innovators.
If Ideas are the Seeds of Innovation…
Innovation is a product of human activity. Innovation keeps life interesting, yet it begins first, with ideation: the creation of a new thought or idea. In the following article, innovation practitioner Robert Brands shares a few idea management tips to help companies get back to the business of ideation.