Resources for Innovation – The Power of Constraints

The wise stewardship of resources is the task of any organization. How those resources are deployed for maximum gain is the key responsibility of organizational leadership. The only problem with this concept is what happens when wise stewardship comes up hard against the necessary risking of resources for the material benefit of innovation? Unfortunately, in the present “economic unpleasantness” as a dear friend keeps calling the train wreck that is this great recession, stewardship of resources has digressed to hoarding of resources. Save for one notable exception – human resources.

The Politics of Innovation – Dodging the Seagulls in “Finding Nemo”

…Business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else.
- James Surowiecki

Playing Games With Innovation
Let’s be blunt, innovation has become the latest political football in many organizations and the competition around owning it has become fierce, if not ugly. For those organizations who do not know how to address [...]

Innovation Economies & The Benefit Of Creative Destruction

Today innovation sits at the heart of economic value creation. If the 1980’s were all about productivity, the 1990’s were about quality, and the 2000’s about globalization, the current decade will most likely be about the capacity of organization to harness the controlled chaos inherent in innovation to create value. With the acceleration of globalization process, innovation is more and more seen as the appropriate tool to create business value.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? (A call to arms from Seth Godin)

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin

Genius Marketer Markets Book Ingeniously
If Seth Godin was doing anything with his past books it was perhaps leading a trail of breadcrumbs to this current book, Linchpin. Where Tribes (2008) was a call to finding a following [...]

5 Innovation Traps in Organization Culture

“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”
- Oscar Wilde
Organizations can be such powerful forces for change. Sometimes they can get in their own way and the value they could bring to life becomes trapped. A little experience of the ways in which an organization’s culture can trap innovation might help others avoid [...]

Mix Business With Design Thinking – from Fast Company

We’ve all heard the news that the traditional MBA framework is broken, but adding courses on business ethics and financial crises won’t solve the problem. And although Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, and the rest are all considering bringing new ways of thinking into their hallowed halls, a relatively small school in Canada is actually transforming the [...]

Bricolage – Innovating with what you have

Bricolage, is a term used to refer to the creation of a work (of art, design or construction) from a diverse range of things which happen to be available, or the work created by such a process. This term comes from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – the core meaning in French [...]

People are People – Teams do not equal performance

People are people
So, why should it be
You and I should get along so awfully?
- Depeche Mode, song “People are People”
All organizations are seeking to do more with less. The rising unemployment rates around the world are testament to the fact that dynamic movement of people between organizations has gone, at least for the time being. [...]

Service Offerings

Primed Associates offers a set of services to meet the needs of an organization seeking to rapidly improve its return on innovation investment. See a more detailed overview of our service offerings here. No matter where you find yourself – be it wrestling with the place of innovation within your over-arching strategy, or tackling the [...]

Emergence in Organizations

Emergence is a key property of complex systems. It is also, many believe, the key to fundamental change in human organisations. In this article the author proposes that while emergence is neither predictable nor controllable there are some factors which predispose an organisation towards emergent change. He also notes that those factors may be influenced [...]