Social Movements Can Teach Us A Lot About What It Takes To Innovate

When Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan, they inspired the nation and the world. Soon, similar protests soon began popping up in nearly 1000 cities in 82 countries. It was a massive outpouring, but within a few months the protesters had disappeared, achieving little if anything at…

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Why It’s Important to Help Leaders Learn Fast From Failure

From a young age, we are programmed to avoid failure. Or we’re taught that it’s OK to fail as long as we don’t make the same mistake twice. But as we grow up and enter the working world, failure has different consequences. Failure, the thinking goes, comes at a high price professionally. It’s often expensive for employers and it can be costly to…

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Why Do So Many Innovation Programs Fail?

Whenever we talk to executives and ask how their past innovation efforts have succeeded, we usually get quite a muted response. Most have tried at least some innovation initiatives or programs, and many have had positive experiences from some of them, but overall the end result often seems to be a bit of a disappointment. These executives aren’t…

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"Innovation" Has Lost Its Meaning. How Can We Get It Back?

The true definition of innovation has been lost amid the chaos of our infatuation with the new. Alain Sylvain explores how we got here and what comes next. The business world is obsessed with “innovation.” We’re appointing Chief Innovation Officers, attending innovation festivals, reading books and articles about it (case in point), taking courses…

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Calling BS on Corporate-Startup Engagement Myths

We need to take a step back from the accelerator fairytale to ask ourselves a fundamental question: why? Christian Lindener, Managing Director at Wayra Deutschland, connoisseur on the start-up-venture-capital scene and speaker at Innov8rs Helsinki (5 September 2019), tells us how we identify whether or not engaging with startups is a complete…

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Loonshots: How to Embrace a Culture of Crazy Ideas

Why do organizations pull the plug on many of their greatest ideas, before they have the chance to take root or prove their value? Safi Bahcall explains how innovation teams can make meaningful structural adjustments, to nurture what he calls loonshots. It’s the way we reach the discoveries and inventions which will ultimately shape our world:…

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A Journey Through Explorium: Shanghai’s Omnichannel Retail Lab

To glimpse the future of retail, look no further than China’s east coast megapolis, Shanghai. And the experience wouldn’t be complete without a sojourn to the Fung Group’s Explorium - once a member’s only shopping club, now a start-up incubator and retail experimentation lab. On 26 June, Explorium will open its doors to corporate innovators from…

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Why We Need To Stop Inventing Things

Corporate innovation often isolates or alienates those who are best-placed to solve real problems. We called upon the wisdom of Neal Cross to explain why innovators need to stop innovating to focus on doing better by those around them, and how he turned the conventional corporate innovation model upside down to shape the future of digital……

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Lessons Learned In Navigating China’s Innovation Frontier

China is fast closing the innovation gap. In recent years, a handful of Chinese companies garnered a great deal of attention on the global stage. As such, there has been a dramatic change in outside perceptions of the country’s capacity for innovation: what was once a question of whether China can innovate, has now become one of how it is…

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ING’s Digital Transformation: 4 Lessons on Culture, Collaboration & Competition

It’s been 25+ years since Bill Gates dismissed retail banks as ‘dinosaurs’, and banks have come a long way from the self-satisfied ‘take it or leave it’ attitude when it comes to customers and their products. We humans don’t want to have to think about managing money: simply put, we have better things to do. And yet the world of banking is turning…

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How Co-creation Is Driving Corporate Innovation In Shanghai

Silicon Valley was long considered the world’s crucible for innovation. But Shanghai, the face of China’s economy and financial capital, is set to compete head-to-head with San Francisco and transform itself into a hub for science and technology innovation, with a specific focus on  integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine,…

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Amdocs Shapers: Bringing Breakthrough Ideas to Life

Two years ago, Amdocs spearheaded Shapers, a disruptive leadership program which sought to turn 18 self-nominated employees with big ideas into millions of dollars in revenue. Amdocs, providing services and software globally to leading media and telecoms companies, wondered how, in a world of exponential change, they could outpace themselves and…

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