In building your career, you're likely asked to choose one of two tracks: to become a specialist or to pursue the path of a generalist. This article takes a look at advantages and disadvantages of choosing either of these two paths, and discusses some grey area in between.
How do great leaders separate themselves from the rest? This article will examine how several excellent leaders, including Rich Teerlink and Steve Jobs, were able to inspire their teams, develop incredible products, and transform their companies.
Highly innovative leaders need to share a clear vision, practice effective communication, and make a commitment to roll imagination into reality.
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.
Maintaining productivity and positivity in the workplace is an ongoing struggle for many businesses and employees. The grind of 9-to-5 life weighs on people and makes it hard to find excitement and motivation throughout the day.
We’ve heard it time and time again – 90% of startups fail in the first five years of operating. Bad financial decisions, a poorly designed business model, a wrong product for the market, financial mismanagement, and bad timing are just some of the most commonly cited reasons why some businesses never manage to pass the five-year threshold.
Imagine a world where customer service, procurement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and sales can truly help each other and work together, instead of stepping on each others’ toes and pointing fingers. A world where all parts of the organizations work together with a shared sense of purpose, no matter how different their cultures, processes, and systems, have been in the past.
The most successful businesses and corporations in the world place employee satisfaction on the same pedestal as customer satisfaction. These corporations understand that without a loyal, creative, and cohesive team of satisfied employees, success cannot be attained.
Innovation is risky. Customers are not asking for it. We are already successful… Getting momentum behind significant innovation is difficult, and sometimes it’s easier for a business to stay in what they deem a safe spot. Let’s look at seven arguments that inhibit innovation as well as their counter arguments.
An in-house innovation program is becoming a common fixture in the most competitive organizations. However, in a recessed economy, these research & development programs can sometimes get eliminated, because they struggle to prove or articulate value.
The latest Innovation Leaders research shows that there is an increasing number of high-growth companies that are prepared to take greater risk and make big bets. Rather than focus just on incremental growth, they are being bolder and are seeking to develop more radical innovation opportunities. Despite requiring significant investment and offering no guarantee of success this approach has been transformational for some. Where and why is this happening and what has changed that has made this approach more common?
When it comes to transformation programs, internal alignment forms the foundation for strategic success. Naturally, aligning an organisation to its strategic priorities requires serious upfront investment in terms of time. But without this time, it’s a case of ‘fail to prepare – prepare to fail’.
In our previous posts, we’ve made two major points. One: innovation is vital for the long-term survival of any business. And two: a handful of crazy ideas won’t cut the mustard. Successful innovation is a complex process that requires a whole lot more than just riotous creativity. Based on academic research, and in close collaboration with professor Frederik Anseel (Ghent University), we’ve defined three innovation profiles: ideators, champions and implementers. Each of these personas has a crucial part to play in what we like to call ‘innovation dream teams’. What makes them unique and why do you need all three? Let’s take a closer look.
What should a roadmap that helps you develop corporate innovation capabilities look like? How do you bring new thoughts and approaches together with current and past initiatives (both successes and failures) and turn this into a single framework? How do you keep pushing and developing your organization to become more flexible and agile without losing out on the current overall efforts and expected results?
Recent experiences show that Agile project-management methods can be used in the innovation process and has a great potential to reduce development time and increase the success rate of new products. The article briefly outlines how an Agile method, such as Scrum, can be used within a structured innovation process with milestones and decision points, such as Stage-Gate®, and what benefits it provides to both manufacturers and service-providers.
