Why Your Business Transformations Fail

Ambitious and impractical business schemes can often lack the fundamental elements needed to make them a reality, leaving huge expense and casualties of the blame game in their wake. The business world is littered with the remnants of unrealised programs and unsuccessful plans for development, several of them so high profile as to have attracted national notoriety.

Optimizing Meetings to Maximize Individual Brainstorming Time

Are you overwhelmed by unnecessary meetings? We’ve all been there: one more meeting, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You’ve been trying to make some real progress on your creative project, but the constant meetings have really been cutting into your individual brainstorming time. If you feel like the number of meetings you’ve been attending is cutting into your productivity, you’re not imagining it.

Innovation: Knowing Where to Begin

Let me see if this situation sounds familiar: you’ve promised your boss that you’ll generate at least one percent growth over last year. You’ve been racking your brain with ideas about how to improve your product or develop a new offering or finding new efficiencies which will help your margins, but the few ideas that you’ve come up with haven’t had legs and pages keep coming off the calendar.

9 Ways to Elevate Your Business Performance with Mind Mapping

How can mind mapping help businesses elevate performance and strive towards innovation? Every entrepreneur or business professional will agree that an exceptional business performance is what drives the company and exemplifies a solid base for success, amongst great competition and fast moving markets, always hungry for innovation and groundbreaking products or services.

How to Effectively Manage the Fuzzy Back End of Innovation

You have doubtless heard of the fuzzy front end of innovation. It is another name for idea generation. But Jeffrey Baumgartner believes that the back end of innovation, where implementation is supposed to take place, is just as fuzzy. Many companies lack clear, efficient processes for implementing the ideas they generate.

It’s open innovation. What could possibly go wrong?

Some open innovation experiments are more successful than others. Here are 3 common areas where companies run into trouble trying to implement it.

How to define your strategy

The key element in developing business strategy is to define your intent. A company's intent could be to lead in some markets, and be a follower in another. A company can be a niche player, or a low cost leader, or the high value leader. Whatever the selection, it should be based on the desire to win and to determine what can be versus what is.

Innovation management: How to prioritize, filter and plan ideas

Once you have set up an integrated innovation framework and trained your employees in innovation tools and processes, they're going to generate a lot of ideas. What are you going to do with them? If you don't have a prioritization or "screening" process, you run the risk of being overloaded by poor quality ideas which may "jam" up your idea management system. Having a business-focused, structured prioritization process is central to the successful implementation of an integrated innovation framework within any business.