722 Posts Found

Patents reveal the most innovative places to do it.

Content: Article | Source: The Economist | Subjects: Innovation, International

The most surprising thing was that if terrorists rolled a hand grenade down the middle of a room, all our CIA employees would jump out of their seats and throw their bodies on it to protect everyone else. They would all give up their lives for one another and their country. However, if someone ran into the room and said, ‘I need someone to make … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gilman Louie | Source: The Wilson Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Sitting monarchs don’t usually lead revolutions. Yet most management systems give a disproportionate share of influence over strategy and policy to a small number of senior executives. Ironically, these are the people most vested in the status quo and most likely to defend it. That’s why incumbents often surrender the future to upstarts. The only solution is to develop management systems that redistribute power to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

We know a lot about how to engender human creativity: Equip people with innovation tools, allow them to set aside time for thinking, destigmatize failure, create opportunities for serendipitous learning, and so on. However, little of this knowledge has infiltrated management systems. Worse, many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. They give a few individuals creative roles and the time to pursue their interests … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible – by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vinton Cerf | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we’re fearful, we freeze up — like a nine-year-old who won’t draw pictures, for fear that everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.

Content: Quotation | Author: Faith Ringgold | Source: Fast Company | Subject: Creativity

Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. The problem, we believe, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Michael L. Tushman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

To consistently turn out profitable new offerings, companies must integrate three distinct innovation portfolios.

Content: Article | Authors: Ron Kerber, Tim Laseter | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

Jim March, professor emeritus at Stanford University…pointed out that our understanding of how to manage creativity is impeded by the lack of a theory of novelty, and proposed the beginnings of one. Three conditions seemed to him to be necessary for novelty—slack, hubris, and optimism—which suggest mechanisms that organizations could employ. Slack in an organizational setting means sufficient time and resources for exploration. Increasing hubris … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jim March, Mukti Khaire, Teresa M. Amabile | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

We came up with five elements that would foster innovation… One, innovation has to start with insights about the customer. Without identifying a need, you can’t come up with new products or processes. Two, great products today have great designs. …Three, you have to encourage experimentation. You must hire people who don’t listen to you… You have to create a sandbox where people can play—and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Anand G. Mahindra | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework – a tolerance for error and failure — into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

If organizations are to achieve and sustain high performance, they need to regard innovation as a business discipline, and then manage and execute it accordingly—as an end-to-end process, from insight development to idea generation to development to marketplace launch.

Content: Article | Authors: Adi Alon, Daniel D. Chow | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subject: Innovation

Many factors drive a company’s performance, not the least of which are entrepreneurial creativity and managerial effectiveness. In two papers recently presented at the fifth annual Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference (ACAC) at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, U.S. and Australian faculty presented their research on the effects of group mood and managerial mental models on creative and structural dynamics, offering strategies for enhanced business success. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Emory | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

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Lo and behold, contests actually work to spur innovation. So should we use them for everything?

Content: Article | Author: Anya Kamenetz | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Best Practices, Innovation, Management

If you have accepted “innovator” as some part of your identity, what sort of innovator are you? Venkat Rao offers a dictionary of personality types he’s encountered and offers some of his favorite examples from history.

Content: Article | Author: Venkatesh Rao | Source: ribbonfarm | Subject: Innovation

All innovation begins with inclusion. It is only when we take an inclusive view of things that the mind leaps forth with ideas that nest neither in the present nor the past. Inclusion is about feelings for people and situations that are twice removed from ourselves. When we can build an idea that makes a difference to people and situations twice removed from where we … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Subroto Bagchi | Source: MindTools | Subject: Innovation

If we…create pictures [by] breaking down any problem and its corresponding picture into distinct “who,” “what,” “how much,” “where,” and “when” elements, we can convey the “how” and “why” to anyone in a way they will understand.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dan Roam | Source: Sun Microsystems | Subjects: Communication, Creativity

How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced “Mona Lisa” as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

Content: Article | Author: Michael Michalko | Source: ribbonfarm | Subjects: Innovation, Personal Development

The frequently occurring challenges to innovation and new ventures in large corporations are:
1. the lack of vision at the executive level
2. the initial magnitude of the opportunity
3. the internal competition
4. the availability of resources
5. the isolation of the innovative function

Content: Article | Author: Roy Serpa | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior