Consultant-Led Innovation
Finally, remember Innovation won’t come from plans or people outside your company – it will be found in the people you already have inside who understand your company’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Steve Blank, Esade Business School Commencement Speech I think Steve Blank – well-respected thinker on innovation and entrepreneurship – has hit a key point […]
Model for Employee Innovation: Amazon Prime Case Study
As more organizations expand the innovation mandate throughout their workforce, creating and maintaining an ongoing employee innovation program is critical. Sustainable innovation requires a process, not a haphazard, random luck approach. To that end, a useful model to follow is: The different activities address important aspects of innovation, from eliciting tacit ideas inside people’s heads… Read More
It’s Not Idea Overload. It’s Filter Failure
At the recent Front End of Innovation conference, Wells Fargo’s Michael Duke presented in a session devoted to innovation metrics. He opened with a slide that asked attendees: Which would you rather have? – 1,000 ideas; or – 20 working prototypes With a setup like that, what do you think the general response was? Of […]
Avoiding Innovation Chaos inside Companies
Great news…you’ve established your innovation platform to solicit ideas, and gosh, did you get them! Hundreds of ideas. Wow! Now what? It just doesn’t make sense to go into an innovation initiative with only half a plan. As in, a plan to market to employees and get the ideas, but not have nailed down what […]
Who Are Your Positive Deviants?
The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed The famous William Gibson quote above is generally considered in the context of advanced technologies. Makes sense, seeing as he is a science fiction writer. But I’d like to bring the concept down to a more tangible, prosaic level. One that has value for […]
Goal Setting Stimulates Employee Innovation
In a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog, Why I Don’t Innovate at Work, Andrew O’Connell writes about some disturbing research: We relentlessly work to avoid “image risks,” to borrow a term from business researchers Feirong Yuan of the University of Kansas and Richard W. Woodman of Texas A&M. They use the phrase […]
Organizations’ Innovation Dark Energy – Employee Motivations
Scientists estimate that 74% of the mass-energy of the universe is made up of dark energy. Dark energy is an expansive form of energy that fills the empty space between cosmological objects. Scientists know it’s there, but they can’t see it. Dark energy is a useful metaphor for understanding organizations’ challenge and opportunity in innovation. […]
