722 Posts Found

Beware conventional wisdom about how to boost your innovation capacity. Another firm’s best innovation practice could become your worst nightmare. Think of innovation as a value chain comprising three phases: idea generation, conversion, and diffusion. Then tailor your practices to your company’s needs.

Content: Article | Authors: Julian Birkinshaw, Morten T. Hansen | Sources: BNET, Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bruce Lynn, Katie Ledger | Subjects: Creativity, Success / Failure

Geniuses are great. But bright, motivated teams are better. Unfortunately, many companies are pouring more money into generating ideas, but falling short on team-building, networking and collaboration. In a Wall Street Journal Online article, Accenture’s Robert Thomas and three noted academics dissect the problem and posit a solution.

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew Hargadon, Rob Cross, Robert J. Thomas, Salvatore Parise | Source: Accenture | Subject: Innovation

A new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types – quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet. [Hat Tip to Bruce Lynn]

Content: Article | Author: Daniel Pink | Source: Wired | Subject: Innovation

How can other companies write their own disruptive success stories? We have found the following five principles to be a good starting point.

Content: Related Content | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: Forbes | Subject: Innovation

Companies are beginning to look beyond traditional metrics like price-earnings ratio to assess their effectiveness at generating growth through innovation. Determining a company’s future-value premium provides a simple but effective way for management to diagnose and understand the complexities of market expectations, as well as the investment community’s confidence in the company’s long-term outlook.

Content: Article | Authors: Marco A. Merino, Toni C. Langlinais | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subject: Innovation

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

Content: Quotation | Source: The New Transnational HR Model: Building A Chaordic Organization | Subject: Innovation

While there is an innovator’s dilemma, there is also an innovator’s purpose. Less well known, an innovator’s purpose drives innovators to see beyond current convention, counters the natural risk aversion that large companies have to innovation, and mobilizes employees to accomplish their goal. As this author writes, purpose-driven innovation is the only way to change the rules of the game for lasting advantage.

Content: Article | Author: Nikos Mourkogiannis | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Innovation

When an idea takes off, its success, in hindsight, seems obvious. Why didn’t you think of salsa chips shaped like little scoops? Yet, too many attempts at innovation fail. Often, the problem is a backward-looking process. Companies invest too much in marginal improvements and too little for products consumers have never dreamed of. The authors present a rigorous, four-step approach that focuses on distilling a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Kermit King, Marcus Bokkerink, Michael J. Silverstein | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Innovation

This ChangeThis manifesto brings our attention to the ‘Seven Sins of Solutions’, the traditional ways of thinking that prevent us from divining the most accurate-and elegant-of solutions to any problem solving situation.

Content: Article | Author: Matthew E. May | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Innovation, Personal Development

What is the force turning the technological tides? Traditional answers focus on what is essentially the “supply side” of technical change — the evolution of firm capabilities. Ron Adner, Associate Professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD and Daniel Levinthal Professor of Management at Wharton, argue that in fields such as electronics and information technology, where constraints on technology development are relatively low, technology evolution … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ron Adner | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Innovation, IT / Technology / E-Business

We think we know what innovation means, but to study it, we use fiscal measures that don’t actually tell you much about innovation or invention. Consider patents. What are patents? They’re legal documents. They’re not in themselves a measure of inventiveness. Research and development spending is a measure of how much you spend on research and development. It doesn’t tell you anything about outputs.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Innovation, Measurement

For more than 100 years, Writers’ Workshops have offered writers deep and generous insights into their own work: insights that have helped them improve, and often inspired them to take their work in exciting new directions. Recently, technical, scientific, and business professionals have also discovered the immense value of the Writers’ Workshop format in solving their creative problems. Now, an experienced leader and participant shows … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Richard P. Gabriel | Subjects: Innovation, Miscellaneous

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this-and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: How to Change the World | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.

Content: Quotation | Source: How to Change the World | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Over the past decade however there has been a growing interest in the role which territory (in the form of regions, industrial districts or innovative milieux) plays in fostering technical change and industrialinnovation…One of the many virtues of this book is the way it penetrates beneath these superficial similarities, exposing a more complex, more telling set of differences which help to explain the very different … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: AnnaLee Saxenian | Subjects: Economics, Innovation

The creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

In today’s business environment, innovation seems to be the one thing that nobody can get enough of. Nevertheless, is there really an automatic link between technological innovation and increased profitability? And if not, do we know what factors determine when technological innovation will be translated into money in the bank? In their working paper, “What Do We Really Know about When Technological Innovation Improves Performance … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joan Enric Ricart, Tunji Adegbesan | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Innovation

Numerous people have studied the process that creative people go through to develop their ideas. Most of these students of creativity agree that ideas come from a subconscious process that takes two relatively unassociated thoughts and combines them together to produce a new thought-a new idea.

Content: Quotation | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Innovation can be measured in many different ways, but the surest indicator of success is cash payback to your company’s bottomline. There are 4 “S factors” to getting the job done right: startup costs, speed to market, scale to volume, and support costs.

Content: Article | Author: James P. Andrew | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subject: Innovation