How To Be An Effective Rebel

Francesca Gino is an award-winning behavioral scientist, researcher, and author. She works as a professor at Harvard Business School and has been named one of the top 50 most influential management thinkers. Her 2018 book, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life, has created a buzz throughout the business world. In her…

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The Five Habits of High-Impact Intrapreneurs

Intrapreneurs who try to make change from the inside out are often met with resistance, which either makes them give up and get in line or burn out and leave the company. Challenging the status quo with disruptive ideas requires balancing the rebel spirit with diplomatic tactics. These diplomatic rebels are successful in inspiring change because…

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Building a Capability for Strategic Innovation

Strategic innovation is an organizational capability the fuels growth and renewal of mature organizations. It operates in a context of high uncertainty and ambiguity, and therefore requires different managerial and executional approaches than those that drive the core business. Companies initiate strategic innovation on a sporadic basis but so…

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How The Most Innovative Companies Empower Their Employees to Work on Their Own Ideas

Most companies have under-utilized one of their most important assets – the ideas inside their employees’ heads. Frontline employees by virtue of working with customers and products every day are bombarded with insights that can have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line. However, in most companies, these employees don’t have a voice…

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Lean Scaleup: Set Your Corporate Ventures Up For Success

Corporate innovators must start with four things that help to adapt to budget cuts, to set up the company for post-crisis growth and to maintain corporate innovation’s role within the company: Understand the “new normal” Spot the opportunities coming from changes in customer needs, customer journeys, shifts in the channels and from new business…

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Ignoring the Future Won’t Make it Go Away: Learning How to do Business in the Era of Macrotrends and the Next Abnormal

This is a guest post by Ken Tencer, CEO at Spyder Works, as originally published here. I think we can all agree, it’s been quite a year. From a global pandemic to a rapidly changing work environment and economic uncertainty, the changes we’ve seen this year have come to affect us all. In one way or another, we were all blindsided by COVID-19. But…

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Be(come)ing Ambidextrous: What Works and What Doesn't

Much has been written (and argued) about "the Ambidextrous Organization" since the early 2000's when Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman found that ambidextrous organizations were significantly more successful in launching breakthrough products or services. The idea makes perfect sense: ambidextrous organizations separate their new, exploratory…

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How to Find Problems Worth Solving

How do you build a better product? More importantly, how is “better” defined? Problem-solving is challenging because the innovator needs to understand what improvements are required before a better product can be built. A snippet from Ash Maurya’s session during the Innov8rs Connect Unconference, June-September 2020. To watch the full session…

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The Acorn Method

To learn how to create sustainable growth, it’s unnecessary to compare yourself to fast-growing unicorns. Instead, look out your window and take inspiration from the humble oak tree and its acorns. Trees have been thriving on our planet for hundreds of millions of years, so they are the perfect example of growing in uncertain times. Oak trees, in…

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Seeding Startups for Self-Disruption: Stories of Ford, P&G and Audi

Since most internal innovation programs don't yield significant results, and neither do investments in corporate venture capital, there has to be a better way for corporates to successfully innovate. As such, companies serious about their future have started building new ventures. These new ventures are close enough to the core business to…

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Framing the Case for Change in 1-2-3

You need to make a case for change more than ever in the midst of uncertainty and a rapidly changing market landscape. In this session Carolina Wosiack, Managing Director EMEA at CI&T, offered a framework and examples of how small experiments can make a case for change, moving people from opinions to data-driven decisions, resulting in…

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How to Plan and Run a Successful Online Employee Ideation Challenge

Brainstorming new ideas and new ways to solve central business challenges is core to the innovation process. But COVID-19 has disrupted that process, taking away options like hackathons and design thinking workshops. Instead, work is shifting online, bringing with it a few changes that are crucial to continuing success. A snippet from Coby…

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