How To Scale Innovation Successfully
Although it is no surprise to boards and CEOs that digital technology is transforming the business world as we know it, the transition is fraught with difficulty. In fact, up to 70% of companies’ digital transformations do not succeed. According to Tony Saldanha, these failures are largely due to incorrect transition scaling. He has developed a…
How To Put People First In Your Intrapreneurship Program
Innovation may be fueled by technology, but it’s driven by people. David Hengartner helped spawn GETKICKBOX, a gamified innovation program that helps facilitate intrapreneurship, and he has seen first-hand how and why innovation is all about people. GETKICKBOX takes a novel approach to innovation. It doesn’t only act as an incubation…
Validation of Go-to Market Tactics in Life Sciences
A successful product launch during the ‘New Normal’ is anything but a leap of faith. On the contrary, the assumption-based decision-making and persuasive selling that were commonplace as recently as January 2020 are being replaced with evidence-based decision-making and remote validation. These paradigm shifts are among the key points covered by…
Fearless Innovation: Going Beyond the Buzzword to Continuously Drive Growth, Improve the Bottom Line, and Enact Change
Whether you are a large or small company, your biggest asset isn’t your cash in the bank. It’s your employees. They are the ones with the best understanding of what can be improved at your business, what your problems are, and where your greatest opportunities lie. Too often, however, companies are too focused on the innovation itself…
Last Exit: Trust – How to Build New Companies in Eye-to-Eye Partnerships
When building a new company or startup, it is important that everyone involved in the partnership see eye-to-eye. No matter how you define the structure, partnership, or governance of your venture, the only thing that keeps things running when two or more parties are involved is trust. All of the parties must be able to trust each other. In…
Psychological Safety for High-Performing Teams
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — all of which are essential for innovation. Especially in…
Selecting Your Corporate Startups for Post-Crisis Bounce-Back
How many new businesses has your company built up over the last 3-5 years? And if you did, what is their actual impact? Chances are, your corporation knows how to generate ideas. Most likely even more ideas that can ever be implemented. Yet innovation ultimately is not about ideas – it is about capturing value from new offerings in the form of…
Testing Business Ideas: The Why, What and How
David J. Bland set out to help fix a problem that seven out of ten products face: their failure to deliver on expectations when they launch. David believes that systematically testing new business ideas will dramatically reduce the risks that products face when entering the market. As co-author of Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid…
People (Also) Make The Difference in Innovation Management
The evidence is clear: it is the people who make the difference in innovation. In his talk recently during Innov8rs Connect – Talent & Teams, Peter Daels concentrates on two particular trends in innovation management: the ambidextrous approach to innovation and people-centric operations. He then goes on to explain why people are the…
Fruit, Tree and Soil: Innovating and Incubating in Large Organizations
Innovation is a tricky word to talk about. Any time you bring up innovation, everyone’s mind goes in different directions. For your business, innovation might involve ad-hoc, disruptive projects done by teams and leaders with strange titles and fantastical project names. But for others, innovation may be a more holistic, integrated disruption…
It’s More Fun To Be A Pirate In The Navy
When Steve Jobs said that it was ‘more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy’, he was highlighting the fact that large companies are much slower to respond to change than startups. This is the speedboat versus oil tanker conundrum. The bureaucracy that runs many established companies is inadvertently designed to create inertia. This is not…
Cultivating The Soil for Organizational Transformation
Despite massive investments of time and money, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many companies. Innovation and transformation initiatives frequently fail, and intrapreneurs have a hard time sustaining their efforts. Driving change in large organizations often feels like the loneliest job in the world: working 80h weeks, facing the…
