Before being acquired by Facebook for US$1 billion, Instagram was just another photo-sharing app operating with insignificant infrastructure and a dozen employees. With the ever-increasing potential of modern technology, the next billion-dollar business could start from the comfort of someone’s home. To stay on top, established organisations need to stimulate innovation... and that’s our topic today.
Global innovation projects demand particular leadership competencies in a multicultural and networked environment. Leaders need substantial cultural and market intelligence, facilitation, and orchestration skills in order to accelerate innovation and performance around the world. Yet current leadership models are not designed for this highly challenging environment where performance is critical to international market success.
We live in an increasingly multicultural and networked world where innovation has the potential to transform lives from Austria to Zimbabwe. Leaders and teams are facing changing customer needs across cultures and geographies. If you’re responsible for international products, services, projects, or programs, how are you facilitating innovation and collaboration around the world?
Globalization is great for business: it opens up new markets and allows businesses to bring in revenue and talent from all over the world. However, the first steps into international expansion can be fraught with growing pains, forcing companies to waste time and money on efforts that don’t gain any traction in foreign markets. To avoid this, company leaders have to get ready to embrace change and innovation outside their normal comfort zone. Here’s why it’s important to get comfortable with discomfort when you’re considering international expansion.
Most innovators cultivate traits like creative risk taking, positive reinforcement and strategic planning. However, there is another branch of innovation in which innovators still require a great deal of training.
Many innovation leaders tend to be tactically driven, but their corporate leadership is looking for more strategic planning and analysis. This tension often contributes to high turnover in innovation management roles, based on a misalignment around leadership’s expectations. In this article Anthony Ferrier suggests perspectives and actions that should be considered part of your innovation strategy plan.
The story of a once-innovative financial services firm illustrates the perils of substituting 'messy' innovation with a logical, orderly strategic planning process.
Most managers agree that innovation is the Nordic region’s last stronghold for competing in a global economy. Moreover, they are interested and fascinated by the thought of working systematically with innovation in order to gain a breakthrough to create growth and profitability for their organisations. But why then, is there so much talk and so little action, argue Gunnar Storfeldt (CEO) and Orren Shalit (Founder), S I T Scandinavia.
