How Hot Is Your Next Innovation?

Choosing which innovative ideas to pursue is often an exercise in guesswork. But by using existing management tools in a new way, executives can effectively gauge an innovation’s potential along two crucial dimensions: Can it withstand market pressures from competitors? And can it deliver more economic value to customers than alternatives?

In this article for Harvard Business Review, Monitor partner Geoff Tuff outlines this distinctive approach: … [ Read more ]

How Aha! Really Happens

The theory of intelligent memory suggests that companies relying on conventional creativity tools are getting shortchanged.

Margaret Wheatley

We can”t be creative if we refuse to be confused

The Innovator’s DNA

A major new study involving some 3,500 executives has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. The six-year-long research into disruptive innovation by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard, outlines five ‘discovery’ skills you need. But, says Gregersen, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

Stan Ovshinsky

If you’re going to do something new, you have to overlap fields. God didn’t make disciplines; man did.

William C. Taylor

The most creative leaders I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when best in class isn’t all that great. Instead, they aspire to learn from innovators far outside their industry as a way to shake things up and leapfrog the competition. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially … [ Read more ]

How to Bring Innovations to Market

Management professor Vijay Govindarajan explains why companies have trouble implementing new ideas — and what they should do about it.

Building a Creative Culture in an Organization

Does innovation depend on “Eureka!” moments, experienced only by a lucky few? Creativity and innovation may seem like moving targets, but building a culture that encourages systemic creativity in an organization is possible, as IESE’s Paddy Miller and Azra Brankovic explain.

How Learning Leads to Results

Matthew E. May introduces a passage on the critical role of a learning focus in innovation from The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

Full House of Innovation

I believe that all people are creative, in their own way. Not all people are good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. Innovation success comes not from a single innovator or team, but from a number of people and teams coming together to fill a set of nine innovation roles. These roles must be filled in order for … [ Read more ]

Are You Building a Culture of Innovation? Take This Test

The most successful firms have managed to prevail over the years because of their culture of innovation. Surprisingly, the culture of innovation in enterprises has not changed much in the last 100 years. We invite you to read about the fundamentals of this culture and take an assessment to see how your culture of innovation is performing.

‘Ideacide’ (or 14 Ways to Kill Creativity)

Ideacide is a great way to kill creativity. There are many ways to perform it.

The Path to Successful New Products

Businesses with the best product-development track records stand apart from their less-successful peers in three crucial ways.

Innovation and Corporate Culture

Professor Rajesh Chandy explains why corporate culture is the key to innovation.

Grand Designs

Few organizations, Tim Brown says, are set up to allow much creative collaboration, and even those are often afflicted by a culture that mishandles the results. “Too many ideas that get through to the market make it there because somebody senior is the one sponsoring them,” he says, “not because they’re necessarily the best ideas.”

Brown, president and CEO of Palo Alto-based IDEO, looks to “design … [ Read more ]

Five Gates to Innovation

Corning Inc.’s process for developing inventive products actually works, a claim that few companies can make.

Scott Belsky

[how can one tell if an idea is any good?] Here’s the simple litmus test: Does your community care? Everyone has a “community” of constituents—customers, users, readers, clients, etc. Share your ideas liberally. If your community engages with them (either for or against them), then you know you’re onto something. If they don’t look twice you know that you either need to reconsider the idea … [ Read more ]

How Group Dynamics May Be Killing Innovation

To come up with the next iPad or Amazon, the pacesetters of the future need solitary brainstorming time, according to new Wharton research. In a paper titled, “Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea,” Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive … [ Read more ]

Creative Thinking

We all want and need creativity in our personal lives and at work. But how can we nurture, encourage and use creativity successfully? Patrick Harris offers some suggestions.