Employee-Driven Innovation With Kickbox
Kickbox is many things: an empowerment tool for employees, a blueprint for innovation, an applied MBA, and a proven framework for validating ideas. The Kickbox method has become well-known as a program that can be implemented just about anywhere, but it began as an internal project at Adobe. Chief Strategist Mark Randall came up with the plan to…
Navigating Risk as an Innovation Leader: The Risk of Risk
How does risk affect you when leading innovation? It’s unusual to hear that question because typically we think of risk as a technical thing to manage through numbers and processes. Yet, how an innovation leader relates to risk in a specific situation is a strong indicator of their performance, resilience and well-being. Our responses to risk…
From Mindset to Movement: 5 Innovation Leaders On How To Get Buy-In and Change Culture
Everyone loves disruption, right until it comes to their doorstep. As humans, we seem to be hardwired to protect the status quo, even if future gains may rationally point us towards change. It’s no wonder that we face resistance to and lack of support for our efforts to innovate. All of our colleagues, especially those at the top, may talk a lot…
Coping With Challenges and Changes: Embracing the Growth Mindset and Creating Psychological Safety
As corporate innovators, we face many different challenges, day in, day out. Since Covid hit, as innovation function we’ve been tasked to help with everything from digitizing core business process and product pivots, to launch new potentially self-disruptive ventures in new markets from scratch. Innovation is more important than ever before, yet…
Measuring Innovation Progress and Communicating Innovation Investment
The uncertainty associated with innovation needs to be managed. Yet in order to be able to manage something, it first needs to be measured and understood. Unfortunately, traditional financial accounting metrics have not evolved to address the needs of innovation management, and it’s unlikely that accounting standards will change in the near…
3x Employee-Driven Innovation at NASA, Nestlé and IBM
Sometimes, the best ideas are hidden in plain sight. In every organization, thousands of new business ideas waiting to be unlocked. If well supported, these could lead to major improvements of existing products or services and business models, or to launching new ones alltogether. Yet most employees getting those ideas whilst doing their jobs,…
How Invincible Is Your Company?
There has been a significant shift in leadership attitude towards innovation. Leaders now value innovation as their most important driver of growth. But even as leaders have become more interested in innovation, they still struggle to create the right structures and processes within their companies. So how do we fix this gap between aspiration and…
What Makes Incubation Efforts Successful
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to successful innovation, but we can draw lessons from how other companies have organized their efforts. At a recent Innov8s Connect event, innovation and growth advisor Rachel Gordon sat down with Puja Samuel and Linda Elkins to discuss what makes innovation, and in particular incubation efforts, successful.…
The Science of Innovation
Innovation is not as simple as acting on a remarkable idea. It is a complex process that is scientific at its core but one that can be developed over time. As Sparkademy's Alan Cabello shared with us during Innov8rs Connect Unconference 2021, there are three basic dimensions to innovation: the individual, the team, and the context. They must work…
Scaling Up Corporate Startups: Making The Market
Scaling a fast-growing corporate startup or venture always has its challenges. Fierce competition, countless options and traps, unexpected crises, funding concerns, managing stakeholder expectations and dreams, new technology developments, changing rules of ecosystems, operational challenges, changing laws, and much more can make a scaleup lose…
Digital Management for the Future
Driving real business model change requires more than incremental baby steps. It requires a transformative - even radical - approach to exploiting every digital technology opportunity in an organization. And that’s exactly where digital product management comes in. Built on embracing design principles and quantitative insights to drive change,…
Unlock the Innovative Power of Customer Journeys with Jobs-to-be-done
Customer Journeys are a popular tool to map the end to end customer experience. Combining Customer Journey tools with Jobs-to-be-done transforms them from being solution-focused and complex to inspirational tools to help companies understand their customers needs and become actionable. Customer Journeys are a tool to map the process a customer…
