A growing trend over the past several years has been to host internal innovation challenges. Companies do this because they find it’s an excellent way to find solutions to long-standing problems, positively create culture (particularly in a remote workplace), and also to nurture the budding intrapreneurs who want to find career growth and new opportunities.
For the past decade, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.
Not everyone knows that NASA has embedded crowdsourcing into their strategy and capabilities. But in fact, back in 2011 (after they ran a highly successful crowdsourcing pilot) NASA established the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI).
Conformity may be overrated. Most innovators really do "think different." Learn to spot them, and what they can teach us!
Meet John. He worked in a company with a corporate strategy office but no innovation department. When our firm ran an innovation workshop at John’s company, he took to innovation like a duck to water. Unfortunately, the company’s innovation culture didn’t evolve quickly enough for John, which left him feeling stifled. He ended up leaving the company to pursue innovation full-time.
Let’s face it, creativity separates humans from the rest of the animals. Our species has opposable thumbs and with that, it seems, the inborn drive and ability to alter our environment. No wonder the topic of innovation ability provokes such primal emotions. Yet — like speed, intelligence or artistic talent — innovation talent is NOT distributed evenly across humanity. Given this truth, what is the best approach to driving more innovation in your workforce?
Companies that encourage and reward intrapreneurship have a great advantage when it comes to retaining the best talents - especially important in today’s creative climate. Here are a few ways that your company can turn your employees into highly-engaged intrepreneurs.
Disruptive ideas don’t just happen - they must be championed. In doing so, intrapreneurs must address two fundamental truths when leading big idea innovation: that of value creation and that of persuasive communication. If you want to learn how to scale innovation across your enterprise and create a disciplined approach for creating market-changing ideas, One Hour Innovator is a great place to start.
Life as an innovator can be exciting and terrifying at the same time. The Intrapreneurship Conference is taking over Stockholm for the next three days. We are featuring 25+ intrapreneurs on stage- sharing their approaches and results, their challenges and failures, and their personal hopes and fears. We started the day with trending topics. We asked our four presenters about their lives as innovators in large companies – and how they keep their energy up also when times are though.
Embracing an intrapreneurial mindset, which intentionally disrupts things from the inside out and often from the bottom up, is a radical concept for companies that thrive on stability and predictability. However, if an enterprise is committed to developing its innovation capability through intrapreneurship, three groups of people must be mobilized to make it happen: leadership, stakeholders, and innovation support.
The term “innovative workplace culture” is increasingly clichéd, with little thought about what it means in practice. And yet a successful workplace culture is a business imperative for companies expected to lead the way in design and innovation in today’s experience economy.
Are we still stuck in the innovation processes of the last century? On this week’s episode, Alexander Osterwalder looks at some of the fundamental problems in industries such as banking or pharmaceuticals and why the value propositions of today are not very satisfying for customers. Alex explains why the time has come to create new organizational structures and add a space where new business models and new value propositions can thrive.
In early September 85 smart people gathered for two days at the Pfizer conference center in New York City to talk about their practical experience in identifying, engaging, driving value from and (at times) failing with the most innovative employees in their respective businesses. The 2016 Corporate Intrapreneur Summit was 100% on point in targeting key areas of interest around how intrapreneurs in a corporate setting.
“Companies don’t disrupt, people do,” says Whitney Johnson, who is best known for her work on driving corporate innovation through personal disruption. She discusses the four things that help you know whether you’re on the right or wrong S-curve and shares examples of how to disrupt a constraint in a company environment. Tune in for more insightful advice.
In-house innovation programs are an emerging phenomenon. Many businesses and government organizations are formalizing processes around the innovation practice in order to keep pace with competition and the rapidly changing expectations of the public.
