in Creativity, Innovation, Podcast
In the The Big Bang podcast we provoke and discuss possible futures, which means we have to ask ourselves “what’s possible?” To consider possibilities we have to engage in divergent thinking, and one way to do so is wrong thinking; that is the topic of this episode. …
in Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
Ultimately, just like your business strategy, your innovation strategy needs to be focused. It can’t be all things to all people. It must be able to stand on its own.
Last Friday I conducted a second innovation workshop with graduate students from UABC, the largest university in Tijuana. Before we were done, I made sure they took two things to heart:
The last point is important, and hopefully they caught my drift because a lot of what the media considers innovation fits into the silly category……
in Creativity, Innovation
Sometimes an interesting questions doesn’t come out nowhere, it requires some serious inquiry and reflection. Defining the real problem is the key part of the innovation process, if you don’t figure out the right question to lead your effort you will end up solving the same challenge, in the same way, that everyone else.
At the beginning of the year, I collaborated with an innovation consultancy in Mexico D.F. on a project about dog adoption. To begin, we went out and met people, asked them some questions and generally observed how they interact with street dogs. We then took our notes and observations, put them together and uncovered some great insights, which we then turned into questions that gave us some holes to keep digging through.
Still, it dawned on me that like most organizations, the NGO we worked with had an uninspiring mission statement that any other dog adoption organization could have. So, connecting the on-the-ground insights with this, we shifted the conversation to something more thought provoking!…
in Innovation, Leadership
Leaders lead through questions.
Farnam Street published a post about the art and science of asking better questions. The post includes some good tips on how about asking great questions, so be sure to check it out after you are done here.
Anyway, this got me thinking……