Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
To create innovation there must be a structure that can support the exploration, the risk-taking, the resource expenditure without direct monetary return. A structure that supports innovation must capture and support an organization’s ability to reach beyond what it produces in the present to what it might produce for the future. It demands a structure that can seek and use unknown resources, to build the unknown for unknown customers (or at least meet current customers’ unknown needs!)

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 [...]

Seth Godin – Curiosity is at the heart of Creativity

Seth’s mini-post “Why Ask Why?” on curiosity may not evoke an “A-HA” moment. But I bet it certainly provokes a “YES!” moment or two.
I’ve always said that at the center of innovation lies intellectual curiosity. Without it, you’ll never get beyond the notional boundaries (both real and self-imposed) that good problem-solving and creative-thinking directly address.

Want to Improve Your Innovation Culture? – Start by understanding organizational culture

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass-you don’t see it, but somehow it does something.
- Hans Magnus Enzensberger
What is Organizational Culture?
At its most basic, organizational culture is reflects the “personality” of the organization. Culture is the combination of the held assumptions, espoused values, practiced norms and physical artifacts of organization members [...]

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 [...]

Framing for Accountability in Innovation for Twitter #innochat December 17 at Noon EST (USA)

Accountability – the currency of social innovation

This post is to trigger dialogue on innovation in the moderated Twitter #innochat on Thursday, December 17 at Noon, EST (USA) – all interested parties are welcome to join in. Follow #innochat to join at that time.
“The ancient Romans had a tradition: whenever one of their engineers constructed an [...]

Stupid Wins In The Game Of Innovation – Phil McKinney

Phil McKinney’s latest blog post nails the way in which we are primed to think that creativity and innovation are domains reserved for the “gifted and talented”. So many times our ideas are beaten down by our own ruthless self-censorship, denial and embarrassment-induced conformity. McKinney notes that, “We are a race of innovators – born [...]

I Am Just Like You – Bob Sutton on impediments to self-awareness

Bob Sutton dips into, “David Dunning’s book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we [...]

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 [...]