What do all creative cultures have in common? The common answer is that in order to figure out which ideas will work, people move fast to implement those ideas. I’d argue that more important than that is the ability to recover from failure just as fast:…
Category Archives: Creativity
Tony Fadell: Stay a beginner to drive change
What’s the most powerful technique available to innovators? Observation.
Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod and Nest thermostat, shared his mantra for innovation at a recent TED conference:
“It’s seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that’s important,” Fadell said onstage. “There are invisible problems all around us. First we need to see them. To feel them. Then we can solve them.”
To create a successful business, you sometimes have to break rules. But which ones?
Which rules should we break, but won’t bring our business down if we do? This is a question that not too many businesses ask themselves but should. The simplest answer is to kill some stupid rules, the ones that no one has questioned because “that’s just the way we do things here”; break those and you’ll spark some innovative ideas. …
How do you generate your best ideas?
in Creativity
We all want to have that crazy idea that changes everything for the better. Though ideas are a dime a dozen, in the big scheme of things ideas aren’t that important; there is no innovation without execution. Still, it all starts with an idea. Therefore, our future depends in our ability to generate, capture and develop those insights. …
We don’t need a society of more entrepreneurs; we need a society of hungry minds
As we continue discussing The Future for Youth, we’ve come up with some interesting ideas about what that looks like. One of the key ideas that has come up again and again is that parents should raise entrepreneurial children with the aim that everyone is and should be an entrepreneur.
Should we teach young people to be entrepreneurs? …
Here’s how to take something ordinary and make it extraordinary
Though the old Be Like Mike ads are cultural icons, Gatorade has found a way to make them more interesting. …
Will Chief Innovation Officers still exist in five years?
A recent article in Fast Company touched on the topic of CIOs (Chief Innovation Officer) and how they’ve become more ubiquitous inside large organizations. This is an enterprise innovation tactic years in the making. But, do they actually mean anything?
My take is that in the CEOs call for innovation, there is also a jump for innovation by placing the responsibility for innovation on a single person: the Chief Innovation Officer. Frankly, the Chief Innovation Officer is more akin to placing blame on someone for being “disrupted”; other than the CEO. Why? Because it is a reactive move; not a proactive one.
The CIOs job is to maneuver the business around irrelevance. Giving someone a title can have unintended consequences such as ego driven decision making, which usually leads to blown opportunities and ideas that never had the chance to take off.
And that’s the problem.
If your organization is truly committed to innovation, which it should, then the CEO needs to be the CIO (chief Innovation Officer), period. His job is to set the context for innovation to happen anywhere in the organization; not just R&D, marketing, a team from McKinsey or some special forces team.
There are signs that will tell you when you’ve created an innovation primordial soup, one is ideas are valued more than hierarchy; not the other way around. To be clear, I’m not saying Chief Innovation Officers are worthless, I’m saying we shouldn’t see them as a sign that “innovation” is going to happen.
So, will Chief Innovation Officers still exist in five years? Hopefully not. The better question to ask is, “how might we change organizations so in the next 5 years innovation is expected and not mandated?”.
Bottom line: Innovation can’t be owned or mandated, it needs to be allowed. You can’t tell innovative people to be innovative, but you can let them. Unleash the black sheep and get out of their way; rest assured they’ll innovate.