Don’t let Market Research Myopia Distract you from Innovation

Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.

35 Ways to Cultivate Innovation and Organizational Learning

Innovation and organizational learning are inextricably connected. A company must learn from its mistakes and cultivate multiple pathways for recognizing and leveraging the best ideas effectively, whether those ideas come from inside or outside of the organization, says Jim Clemmer. Here are 35 ways to sharpen your organizational "innovation radar," to accelerate learning cycles and recognize and capitalize on opportunities faster.

Embrace Mistakes as a Source of Learning and Invention

How does your company deal with mistakes? If continuous learning from your employees, innovation and even breakthrough innovation are important to you, it is critical you embrace mistakes, at least as sources for learning and invention.

What is lateral thinking?

Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means. So when I saw a very clear definition and description of it in Paul Sloane's excellent new book, How to be a Brilliant Thinker: Exercise Your Mind and Find Creative Solutions, I couldn't resist sharing it with you.