Five Leadership Strategies That Can Make or Break Your Business in 2011
What’s in store for business leaders in 2011? As I gaze into my crystal ball, I see a year of promise and opportunity. And I see new challenges that require different ways of thinking and leading organizations. It’s not just that opportunities, threats, and changes in the marketplace happen faster and with less predictability than they used to. It’s that they’re also becoming increasingly interconnected and interrelated in ways we’ve never had to deal with before. ... Read more »
New Product Development Requires Fresh Perspective
Developing a new product can be an exciting process for your team; it can also be disastrous if the process is absent of outside perspectives. One of the most important aspects of the development stage is to actively seek out a new perspective on product ideas. All too often, managers become too comfortable with their existing team. While your employees have gained invaluable experience learned from working at your company, an outside, unbiased outlook and opinion on your proposed new product is... Read more »
Experimentation + Risk (+ Failure) = Improved Environment for Innovation
Innovation rarely occurs by accident, but is the result of calculated effort, work and risk taking. In the face of failure, it requires one to try, try and try again. Thomas Edison went back to the drawing board more than 6,000 times before finding the right material to create his incandescent light bulb. Six thousand times. Do you have that kind of innovative stamina? Innovation is an experiment of sorts. It requires a culture of risk, opportunity and challenge. Moreover, for an organization to... Read more »
Innovation Resolution 2011
Welcome to the New Year! As a business leader, what are your New Year’s resolutions for your company? As you think about the future of your company and how to make your business grow, implementing sustainable Innovation should be your top priority for 2011. Innovation is the lifeblood of any company and the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Let’s take a look back at the 2010 Brand Innovations: http://popsop.com/41746 For example, after over 30 years in business, Apple continues to... Read more »
Key Innovations of 2010
The end of the year is a great time to reflect on your companies Innovation performance. Did you deliver your Innovation Goals, maybe the “One new Product or Service per year”? As a business leader, what are your New Year’s resolutions for your company? As you think about the future of your company and how to make your business grow, implementing sustainable Innovation should be your top priority for 2011. Innovation is the lifeblood of any company and the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Let’s... Read more »
RECAP: Innovation(3) Cubed Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit
Dec 9-10 Highlights and Key learning from the Innovation Cubed Conference Creation of Innovation Community is key to keep enthusiasm, communicate and maximize ideation input and efficiency. Many “Best Practice” presenters had the following elements in common: - Vision, Mission, Strategy, Resources, Measurements, Reward - Prepare, Promote, Participate, Identify, Extract, Explore - Wisdom of the crowds o Crowds need to be diverse,... Read more »
Is Your Team Held Accountable?
Before the start of any project, do you ask yourself, “Are my team members held accountable? Do they feel a personal responsibility to deliver the goods?” If you haven’t made the steps to communicate that message yet, it is essential to lay down that foundation in the beginning. For that reason, Accountability is the most important of the ten imperatives in Robert’s Rules of Innovation. In his book, Robert Brands describes the ten factors that must be achieved in order to... Read more »
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit Part 3
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit Doubletree ,Orlando, FL http://www.worldrg.com/showConference.cfm?confCode=MW10005 Follow us on Twitter #i310 and @innovationrules Part 3, Day 2 Dec. 10 Sprint on Team Building in Non Traditional Environment for Innovation (Jack Jennings, Sprint) Organizational Development (OD) key in team effectiveness. Optimal Creating flexible Workforce with Knowledge workers Trust is key, Survey top ten reasons you work besides paycheck Building Trust... Read more »
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit Part 2
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit Doubletree ,Orlando, FL http://www.worldrg.com/showConference.cfm?confCode=MW10005 Follow us on Twitter #i310 and @innovationrules Part 2, Day 1 Dec. 9 Motorola’s Think Tank Idea Exchange: Leveraging the Power of Decision Markets to identify Valuable Ideas (Rami Levy, Motorola Open Source) Wisdom of the Crowd… Every new idea is constructed upon existing ideas… (like Shakespeare) Pre 2007- Idea- ThinkTank-Idea queues->... Read more »
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit
Innovation(3) Crowdsourcing, Culture and Tools Summit Doubletree ,Orlando, FL http://www.worldrg.com/showConference.cfm?confCode=MW10005 Part 1, Day 1 Dec. 9 Imperatives to Create Sustainable Innovation: From Inspiration to Net Reward Robert Brands (www.innovationcoach.com ) Explored and shared the Barriers, Requirements and Ten Imperatives to Create and Sustain Innovation based on “Robert’s Rules of Innovation” (Wiley) Nice opener letting attendees participate and discuss... Read more »
When Smaller Isn’t Better: Innovation That Solves – Not Creates – Problems
By Robert Brands Bottled water consumers might have noticed lately the shrinking size of plastic caps. Conceived as environmentally friendly, they’ve been marketed as the bottled-water industry’s solution to plastic waste that otherwise would end up in a landfill. In the meantime, the caps are too small for some consumers to use easily. They can be difficult to grip and remove or thread and replace, especially for an aging population. And if put on poorly, water leaks out. So much for innovation. In... Read more »
Is your Idea pipeline being filled and maintained?
If even 1% of new ideas succeed, it can lead to a huge payoff. A steady stream of ideas is what fuels Innovation, so one of Robert’s Rules of Innovation imperatives is Ideation, or the idea management processes. On any new product development team, it is up to the leader to facilitate ideation sessions that produce a regular supply of new ideas. In order for these ideation sessions to be as effective as possible, it’s valuable to include members such as the sales team, people who interact... Read more »
Innovate To Thrive!
IdeaConnection Interview with Robert F. Brands, author of Robert’s Rules of Innovation November 14, 2010. By Vern Burkhardt “And the basis of this successful innovation? A natural curiosity, open-mindedness, an ability to see the big picture – combined with hard-headed business acumen.” Robert’s Rules of Innovation, page 39 Vern Burkhardt (VB): You say, “Innovate or die…” It’s that serious a matter for companies, large and small? Robert F. Brands:... Read more »
Innovation Requires Risk Taking
“If you’ve never failed… you’ve never lived” is a popular video on YouTube describing the failures of people like Thomas Edison, once called “too stupid to learn” by his teacher and Walt Disney, who was fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination”. Not every idea succeeds, and indeed, some of America’s most triumphant inventors, artists and entrepreneurs have most likely failed at some point in their lives. But without... Read more »
FRAUD, INNOVATION and societal cost of business gone bad
Bernard Madoff’s and Scott Rothstein’s Ponzi schemes. Medicaid / Medicare scams. School board officials who sell their votes for cash. Mortgage fraud, foreclosure “robo-signers” and short-sales wrought with misdeeds. From Wall Street to Main Street to Washington – and the headline news, very smart, innovative people are gaining prominence nationwide for fraud. Investment scandals, Ponzi schemes and rip-offs in all forms seem epidemic. They capture our attention. We express... Read more »
The Real Recipe for Innovation
By Holly G. Green When I talk to business leaders, I always ask about the most difficult challenges they face day in and day out. Increasingly, I’m hearing about how hard it is to innovate on a consistent basis. This anecdotal evidence is now being supported by a recent McKinsey Global Survey that polled more than 2,200 senior executives around the globe on the challenges of managing innovation. Eighty-four percent of the executives who responded said they consider innovation to be very or... Read more »
FEATURED BOOK: Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire
Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire: A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose Author: Braden Kelley Price: $25.16 Random Page from the Book Editorial Review Consumer Review Summary Description: Want to recapture your organization’s original innovative spirit? Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire helps you remove the obstacles that have crippled the innovation superpowers that made your organization successful in the first place. Helps you identify the blockages hindering innovation... Read more »
Innovation and the Necessity to Inspire
In order for organizations to successfully achieve Innovation – the lifeblood of any company – Robert’s Rules of Innovation gives ten imperatives to follow in order to attain sustainable growth. The ten imperatives begin with the first step that needs to be accomplished before any progress can be made, and that is to Inspire and Initiate. After all, every team needs inspiration to begin a New Product Development process that will drive them towards successful Innovation. Inspiration... Read more »
All Successful Innovation Needs a Champion and Ownership
This is the forth part in a series of articles that take the need of innovation under the loop and share some of the imperatives, must haves if you will, to create and sustain “NEW” in business or organizations. This article focuses on the need for ownership, as all successful innovations need a champion within the organization. See the full article in InnovationManagement here. Innovation needs ownership, a champion within the organization. The champion must convince others to take calculated... Read more »
How Can Your Company Survive in the New Economy While Others Crash?
Six out of ten new businesses fail. Unemployment isn’t getting any better. The housing market is set for another bump in the road next quarter. And as if the cake needed icing, the FDIC is reporting that about half of America’s banks – including the four largest — are on the bubble, and may fail by the end of the year. As serious people at serious companies are looking for answers, one expert wants them to focus on a principle that is often overlooked in hard times:... Read more »
Innovation Evolution
