722 Posts Found

Ideas are a dime a dozen; anyone can have them. They can be good or bad ideas, saving your hide in some cases, wasting your time in others. The best thing about a good idea is that it forces you to act. Insight is rarer, and infinitely more precious. A strong insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand reasons to act and make something … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subjects: Innovation, Knowledge

Improving innovation ability is today the most important lever for increasing profitability and growth. But success is mixed. In just about all industry sectors the 25 percent most innovative companies have 2.5 times as many new products and get 10 times better returns on their innovation investment than the least innovative ones. In 2004 Arthur D. Little conducted its third Global Innovation Excellence Survey on … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Anders Johansson, Frederik van Oene, Georg Beyer, Jasper Boessenkool, Per I. Nilsson | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subject: Innovation

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When the shouting is over, one fact is clear: what differentiates perennially great companies from others is the products they sell. Some companies generate a never-ending stream of products that are appealing to customers and profitable to produce. Other companies achieve product innovation in fits and starts. Yet others launch many failed products, unprofitable products, or “me too” products. This article examines the opportunities to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jean-Philippe Deschamps, P. Ranganath Nayak | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Innovation, Strategy

This guide was designed by CIDEM as a tool aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them assess their capacity for innovation. It is intended as a first step towards setting in motion a broader reflection within the SME community. As a result, its aim is not so much to obtain the right answers as to allow companies to identify the basic issues … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: CIDEM | Subject: Innovation

In late 2004, The Boston Consulting Group conducted its second annual global survey of senior executives on innovation and the innovation-to-cash (ITC) process. A total of 940 executives, representing 68 countries and all major industries, participated. This report highlights some of the top-level findings from the survey and explores the implications. It also offers a framework to guide managers as they continue to think about … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Innovation

Change is not about understanding new things or having new ideas; it’s about seeing old things with new eyes — from different perspectives. Change is not about reorganizing, reengineering, reinventing, recapitalizing. It’s about reconceiving! When you reconceive something — a thought, a situation, a corporation, a product — you create a whole new order. Do that, and creativity will flood your mind.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Change Management, Creativity

How can you build an innovative culture that harnesses the collective intelligence of your organization? Essentially it’s a matter of changing mindsets to help create alignment between people’s aspirations and the larger purposes of the organization. Such alignment cannot be imposed. It must be drawn out individually and collectively – a process that calls for more fundamental change in values and practices than is achieved … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

To innovate, we have to be able to understand, trust, and work with people who see reality differently from the way we see it.

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subject: Innovation

Creating disruptions is fine, but mending them may be even better. The case for cautious inventiveness.

Content: Article | Author: Nicholas G. Carr | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Content: Quotation | Source: Johannesburg Business Day | Subject: Creativity

The cult of innovation seems healthy on the face of it. In a free market, after all, innovation underpins competitive advantage, which in turn undergirds profitability. Being indistinguishable from everyone else means operating with a microthin profit margin, if not outright losses. So why not try to innovate everywhere – to let, as Chairman Mao famously put it, a thousand flowers bloom?

Here’s why not: For … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Nicholas G. Carr | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

How can corporations make themselves more like the market? An excerpt from the best-selling book.

Content: Article | Authors: Richard N. Foster, Sarah Kaplan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

You cannot create against a yielding medium. Let me have something finite, definite. My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.

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

Experience, direct or indirect, is the source of tacit knowledge. Stored in people, tacit knowledge is actuated (shared) though trust formation. Trust develops in predictable network patterns that by their nature run counter (are mis-aligned) to hierarchical organization. If one treats tacit knowledge as a natural resource embodied in humans (or human resource), then knowing where and how to mine the networks for tacit knowledge … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

New product categories can subvert incumbent brands – or give them a new lease on life.

Content: Article | Author: David Aaker | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

When a disruptive new technology arrives, the greatest business opportunities often lie not in creating the disruption but in mending it – in figuring out…a way to use an older, established technology as a bridge to carry customers to the benefits of the emerging technology.

When we talk about business innovation today, we tend to use terms like breakthrough and pioneering and revolutionary. But some of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

How to turn someone else’s idea into a big business.

Content: Article | Authors: Costas Markides, Paul Geroski | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Innovation, Strategy

Quality function deployment (QFD) techniques have long been recognized as a potentially invaluable tool in successful product development. QFD techniques provide a systematic methodology for translating market opportunities and customer needs into clear product specifications that engineers and scientists can use for design, formulation, and development. But despite QFD’s long history of success stories, companies have not yet come close to realizing its full potential … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Arthur D. Schwope, John M. Collins | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Innovation, Management

We must bear in mind, then, that there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Niccoló Machiavelli | Source: The Prince | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation