Consumers Don’t Care About Your New Product…Unless It Puts Them In Control
It’s finally happened - your new product has launched. The R&D behind it is solid. Your marketing is on point. All the time, money, and energy you’ve devoted to this project is about to pay off in spades...right? If you’re like most companies, maybe not. Despite the billions of dollars invested to design and market new products, they have a…
Getting Lean in Italy: An Interview with Tristan Kromer
This is a guest post by Andrea Cocchi, Lean Enterprise & Startup Coach and Innovation Consultant based in Milano, Italy. For Italian companies, Lean mindset is no longer a nice-to-have - it is a must. So why are so few firms getting on board? It’s not that Italian companies are unaware of Lean, or of the need for innovation; the digital…
Talk To Me When You Scale: Since Big is Now Favored Over Small, Is It Time To Ignore Startups?
Apart from some exceptions, the results for corporate-startup collaboration have been generally disappointing. But Joe Haslam believes there is hope - and his optimism comes from experience. Not only is he a professor at IE Business School in Madrid, where he teaches founders and MBA students how to scale their startups, he has co-founded and…
#MonkeyFirst Innovation
At Google’s X division, the company’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is “#MonkeyFirst.” The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you’d better start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal. The problem is that most people…
Don’t Go On Your Own: Lessons From LoyaltyOne’s Corporate Innovation Lab
Some corporate innovation labs never seem to get rid of the image that they're just there for PR purposes, or as nicely decorated conference rooms. Yet some are effective, and have an important role in realizing their organization's innovation agenda. The key? They are not set up and managed as standalone entities, without any real ties into the…
Corporate Innovation: The Talent Perspective
Innovation — the internal capacity to generate new ideas, products, or processes that create value — is one of the engines of corporate success. Unfortunately, it is also an engine of corporate angst. Don’t take my word for it. In a recent survey of CEOs, 81 percent said innovation was critical to their firms’ share price. The same survey found…
Lean Enterprise Transformation: Why We Need It And What It Looks Like
The word transformation seems to scare people off. Many people associate the word with traditional, linear, multi-year programs that don’t take into account the speed of change, rarely test before deploying at scale, and expect significant investment of resources before any measurable business outcome is achieved. And I agree; those efforts scare…
An Ugly Business (Or: Why You Need to Reframe Your Ugliest Challenges and Constraints Right Now)
This article by David Hicks was previously posted here and has been republished with permission. Image © Ugly Models On a scale of 1-10 how beautiful/handsome would you say you are? OK, let’s look at things a bit differently: on a scale of 1-10 how ugly do you consider yourself to be? Were you honest with your assessment or did you try and…
The Innovator’s Rosetta Stone for the C-Suite
Face it, the C-Suite speaks its own language. And as a corporate innovator, so do you. Innovators love change, but working to change the thinking of leadership — dedicated to maximizing the profitability of the core business — is difficult, to say the least. What we need is a way to integrate our needs into the language and systems that dominate…
Benchmark Your Innovation Efforts: First 13 Case Study Talks for Innov8rs LA
During Innov8rs LA, you’ll get access to a diverse range of stories, perspectives and experiences from people doing amazing work driving innovation in large and legacy organizations, across all sectors. There's no better opportunity to benchmark where you stand. To ask how they did it, and discuss strategies and tactics. To get new ideas for…
The Innovative Team: Recognizing and Developing Your Innovators
Creativity is in high demand. According to studies done by Adobe and IBM, 94% of hiring managers consider creativity when assessing candidates, preferring creative candidates 5-to-1. CEOs across the globe consider creativity the #1 leadership quality required for success. But those same studies also reveal that creativity is the one area where…
The Real State of Innovation Strategy, Leadership & Culture
This is an article by Cris Beswick, republished with permission and as originally published at The Future Shapers here We all know there’s nothing new about innovation, or even innovation strategy, leadership or culture. The truth is that as an outcome of creative endeavour, it’s been around since the age of man as we, ‘Man’ has always…
