722 Posts Found

What if almost everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?

It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.
— Hire people you don’t like. Bring in the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential.
— Asking for … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Stephen M. Shapiro | Subject: Innovation

Creativity is natural and abundant, the natural human state. We are creative beings. Being creative is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to marry creativity to discipline so that the discipline amplifies the creativity, rather than squelching it. Truly great entrepreneurs do not just have a great idea (and often, they copy their ideas from others). … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subjects: Creativity, Execution, Innovation

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel,
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room,
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there.

Content: Quotation | Author: Lao Tzu | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Design, Innovation

The fundamental nature of problem solving is to drive something (the problem) out of existence. The fundamental nature of creating is to bring something that is desired into existence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Fritz | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Creativity, Problems / Solutions

As global competition intensifies, it’s more important than ever that companies figure out how to innovate if they are going to maintain their edge, or maintain their existence at all. Six Harvard Business School faculty share insights on the best ways to develop creative workers.

Content: Article | Author: Michael Blanding | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Innovation

Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more creative.

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Howe, Marla M. Capozzi, Renée Dye | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Management

In their new book, The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gergersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on the idea of disruptive innovation to explain how and why the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world are so successful. This excerpt from Chapter One summarizes the five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from run-of-the-mill managers.

Content: Article | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Innovation

Asking the right questions is key.

Content: Article | Author: Kevin Bolen | Source: Forbes | Subject: Innovation

The gap between the germ of a disruptive idea and successful commercialization can be wide. Sometimes, managers can feel like they have not developed detailed enough plans to move forward. After a successful ideation session they might say, “How do we know we generated the right idea?” or “There’s no way we could, in a day, really develop a robust enough plan to actually spend … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Scott D. Anthony | Source: Forbes | Subject: Innovation

In this issue of the American Management Association’s MWorld’s Leader’s Edge Scott D. Anthony provides pointers for executives seeking to identify the hidden innovators within their companies and tips for how to develop the next generation of innovation talent.

Content: Article | Author: Scott D. Anthony | Sources: American Management Association (AMA), Innosight | Subjects: Human Resources, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Business models help support strategic goals, but too often executives don’t inject them with the necessary dose of creativity to bring about real success, according to new research by INSEAD professors Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine.

Content: Article | Author: Mrinalini Reddy | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Innovation, Risk Management

Success requires going beyond winning once to developing deep capabilities that allow a company to repeatedly disarm disruptive threats and seize new growth opportunities. Borrowing a metaphor from the sports (or geopolitical) world, it requires creating an “Innovation Dynasty” that can, year after year, churn out successful growth businesses.

Chapter 10 of The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor (Harvard … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joe Sinfield, Mark Johnson, Scott D. Anthony | Source: Innosight | Subject: Innovation

IBM Global Business Services, Innosight, and APQC’s research has shown the fallacy in the assumption that successful innovation will come simply by replicating the approach used by other successful innovators. A survey of 90 companies across multiple industries and 14 countries shows that the sourcing, shaping and implementation of ideas at innovative firms tends to conform to a small number of innovation archetypes, which represent … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: George Pohle, Stephen Wunker | Sources: American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), Innosight | Subject: Innovation

Lasting innovation in an information revolution doesn’t come from the elite, or from people who already have access to wealth and authority. It comes from the edges, from people who are just gaining access for the first time.

Content: Quotation | Author: Elin Whitney-Smith | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Information, Innovation, IT / Technology / E-Business

Before a company can become the next Apple or Google it must understand its own innovation architecture.

Content: Article | Authors: George Pohle, Stephen Wunker | Source: Forbes | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Companies often want to make decisions based on “the number,” or a precise estimate of a project’s financial potential. When companies only consider a single scenario, they almost always feel as if they have to be conservative, leading them to prioritize “sure things” in known markets over risky ventures in new markets.

While that approach might be reasonable when a company is launching a modest line … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott D. Anthony | Source: BusinessWeek | Subjects: Finance, Innovation, Management

To profit from technology, companies need to change their strategy and begin selling the embodiment of that technology at the ever-shifting point of modular decoupling.

Content: Article | Authors: Christopher S. Musso, Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony | Source: Innosight | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Strategy

Broadly speaking, organic growth can come from natural expansion of the core business, moves into near-in adjacent markets, and the creation of entirely new growth businesses. Companies need to have a rough estimate of their ultimate top-line and bottom-line goals, and how much growth they can reasonably expect to get from each of those three categories.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Joe Sinfield, Mark Johnson, Scott D. Anthony | Source: Innosight | Subjects: Growth, Innovation

Companies have to treat different types of innovation opportunities differently. Companies routinely organize differently to solve fundamentally different problems, yet the area of growth is all too often lumped into one managerial process, governed by one set of metrics. An incremental improvement in an existing market has to be measured, monitored, and managed differently than a completely new strategy that might go into a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Joe Sinfield, Mark Johnson, Scott D. Anthony | Source: Innosight | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

We all know that conventional management structures inhibit day-to-day interaction between departments. The problem shows itself when one department hands a project over to another at the end of a phase: “They can’t make what we’ve designed, and Marketing wants something else anyway!“

People from different departments and disciplines often work to different objectives. In an attempt to overcome the barriers to communication, senior managers may … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Peter B. Scott-Morgan | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior