Gary Hamel

When we went and studied the process of innovation, we found that innovators shared not so much a common set of personal traits, but a common way of looking at the world. Number one, they were contrarians. And by definition the way you create a strategy differentiation means that you violate industry norms. Number two, we found these people were “novelty addicts,” people who loved … [ Read more ]

Gary Hamel

Silicon Valley isn’t based on resource allocation, it’s based on resource attraction, where somebody throws out an idea into this kind of marketplace for ideas. Either that idea attracts capital and talent or it doesn’t. But there’s no giant CEO brain making allocational decisions in Silicon Valley. There are many, many people making those decisions – It’s very distributed. If one venture capitalist doesn’t like … [ Read more ]

David Rhodes, Michael Ackland

The road toward being successfully different usually involves one of three broad initiatives: leveraging a deeper understanding of customer needs; exploiting a deeper understanding of industry economics; or simply having the courage to challenge conventional wisdom-to overturn “the way we’ve always done it.”

First, Forget What Works

The success of an innovative new business may depend on forgetting what makes the core business tick.

James March

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.

Thomas H Davenport and Laurence Prusak

A preoccupation with protecting and hoarding knowledge may actually prevent a company from creating new knowledge. Protection and creation are incompatible urges. The company that spends most of its energy hoarding and protecting its knowledge will have less energy for generating new knowledge and innovations in all aspects of its business. Innovative companies are generally those that do not rest on their intellectual laurels, but … [ Read more ]

Stephen M. Shapiro

As adults, when we try to solve a problem, we often ask, “What does this mean?” We try to pull the answer from our knowledge bank, just like finding the solution in an encyclopedia. Solve the problem the way it has been solved in the past. This can be useful, but it provides a limited set of possibilities. This is about replication and regurgitation. An … [ Read more ]

Lester C. Thurow

Great creativity requires hard facts, wild imagination, and nonlogical jumps forward that are then proved to be right by working backward to known principles. Only the rebellious can do it.

Craig Mindrum

The learning function must…harvest the fruits of collaboration when possible and appropriate – fruits called “innovations” – and it must help divert that collaborative energy somewhere else when it is not appropriate. This latter point is something not often discussed in the literature on innovation. That is, there is a time for innovation and a time for executing on previous innovations. You can’t get anywhere … [ Read more ]

Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution

“Innovation” is one of the great buzzwords of management theory, but this treatise accords it a thoroughgoing analysis. Management consultant Moore, author of the bestselling Crossing the Chasm, argues that companies can escape the marginless hell of commodity and price competition only through innovations that differentiate their products from their competitors’ in the minds of consumers. He elaborates a taxonomy of 15 “innovation types,” from … [ Read more ]

T.I.P.S. The Innovative Practices Summary

Innovation is an elusive, sometimes baffling, entity. Innovative thinking contributes to scientific progress–as in paradigm busting–but it’s difficult to be scientific about what produces innovation. Consider these eleven points, garnered from innovative organizations, in answering the tough but essential question, “What might help our organization be more innovative?”

Roger Martin

When it comes to innovation,business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting … [ Read more ]

Money Isn’t Everything

Lavish R&D budgets don’t guarantee performance. A new Booz Allen Hamilton study of the world’s 1,000 biggest spenders reveals the value of an innovation dollar – and the basics of a better strategy.

Robert L. Sutton

If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure – and the only kind that deserves to be punished. Researcher Dean Keith Simonton provides strong evidence from multiple studies that creativity results from action. Renowned geniuses like Picasso, da Vinci, and physicist Richard Feynman didn’t succeed at a higher rate than their peers. They simply produced more, which meant that they … [ Read more ]

Robert L. Sutton

If you can’t decide which new projects or ideas to bet on based on their objective merits, pick those that will be developed by the most committed and persuasive heretics.

TQM, ISO 9000, Six Sigma: Do Process Management Programs Discourage Innovation?

The decision by a rock group in Northern Kentucky to call itself 6 Sigma suggests that process management programs may definitely be part of mainstream consciousness. But does the continuing popularity of such programs hide the fact that they can end up suppressing innovation? “The risk is that you misapply these programs, in particular in areas where people are supposed to be innovative,” notes Wharton … [ Read more ]

John Dewey

Imagination is a vantage point of the future from which we can consider that which is lacking in the present.

The Key to Innovation: Overcoming Resistance

You should be investing less time in brainstorming good ideas and more time in targeting the sources of resistance to change.

Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets

If your organization aspires to create or conquer the new markets of the twenty-first century, Fast Second offers concrete advice on how to go about achieving this. Internationally acclaimed strategy experts Constantinos Markides and Paul Geroski explore:
– How radical innovation creates new-to-the-world markets
– What the structural characteristics of early markets are and the implications for prospective new entrants
– How … [ Read more ]

Henry Ford

Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.