I think it’s safe to say that we are witnessing the extreme overuse of the term innovation in our speaking, business journals, Wall Street discussions and political dialogue. How did a perfectly good word come to mean so little? The short answer is that the desire to have the benefits of innovation has resulted in […]
I enjoy consuming lots of audio during my travels, the most recent of which was the latest installment of Chris Brogan’s Podcast on Stitcher. On the show, he did a delightful interview with two winsome ladies who have started a new health and fitness movement around the idea that you need to do what you […]
I was talking recently with a C-level R&D leader in a larger public company. By all external measures this company is quite successful, yet they were asking what it takes to build an innovation culture that has sustained momentum. By momentum, he was asking what steps he might take to have more consistent output from […]
Having spoken at the 2014 Society of Concurrent Product Development conference, I was looking forward to the 2015 session. I’m pleased to say it didn’t disappoint. They had 76 attendees at the 3M Innovation Center in Minneapolis, MN (always a great venue), from as far away as Germany. The SCPD as an organization focuses on corporations for the purpose […]
In a recent coaching dialogue with a C-level executive of an international manufacturer, I was asked what minimum elements were necessary for a successful innovation program. This is a very common question that comes from being overwhelmed with the enormous body of innovation information that comes from the popular press on a daily basis. All […]
If you are in a position of accountability for the growth of your firm, recent tidal shifts will make you want to stop and take note. Three recent moves – the sudden reversal of oil prices, the strengthening of the US currency, and the weakness in the BRIC economies – have flipped long-standing narratives on […]
In my coaching work with growth leaders, one of the things we work toward is getting a proper balance of risk and reward in the projects they work on. There are some surprising relationships between these two areas, especially in the later portion of the innovation cycle. Clients are often surprised that one of the […]
One of the most subtle and recurrent traps that organizations fall into repeatedly when launching new innovation is an over commitment of resources to those things they know how to do, as well as an under commitment to those areas that are truly new to the firm. The dismal 25% success rate we talked about […]
For the last six years, I have had the pleasure of serving as a downhill ski guide for blind and disabled skiers at the Black Hills Regional Ski For Light event. The photo above captures me guiding a participant down the slopes in a sitdown bi-ski. I’m finding more and more that skiing is not […]
For regular newsletter readers, we are four steps into a five-post series on developing a cross-functional innovation team that can deliver. To provide sufficient context for the final post, I am going to take this opportunity to do a higher-level briefing on innovation systems. If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can […]
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