Category Archives: Innovation

Enthusiasm drives employee engagement…and innovation

in Innovation, Leadership

As much talk and attention innovation gets, the topic of employee engagement isn’t far behind. And with good reason, the latest report from Gallup concluded that only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Damn!

But Gallup also points out that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%, so there’s something we can learn from organizations with highly engaged employees.

It’s important that we must make a distinction here, for an engaged employee is not a satisfied employee. The point being that just because companies post pictures and videos of their employees having fun doesn’t mean that they are also satisfied with their work.

With that said, the following thread on Quora caught my attention because the person responding indicated why she was both engaged and satisfied with her work: Why are so many people content with just earning a salary and working 9-6 their entire adult life?…

Just a little bit better doesn’t delight customers, it puts them to sleep

in Innovation

Let’s be competitive on price and offer just a little bit of better service…

I heard an on the ground salesperson say that on a call last week. I later told the CEO about it and let him know what I thought about “just a little bit”. Below is an extended version of what I said to him. A quick thought is you will never hear innovators say “just a little bit”, only non-innovators say that!

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Interview: My thoughts on the power of innovation

in Innovation, Interviews

A few months ago I was interviewed by Media Shower about my thoughts on innovation. Here are the questions and my answers about the origin of the Game-Changer blog, my background, how companies can foster free thinking and the development of new ideas, recruit creative thinkers and how anyone can learn to think innovatively. …

New ideas are necessary, but not sufficient for innovation

in Innovation

It’s not the idea, it’s what you do with it. Design an organization that is both competent at generating and executing effective ideas.

For all the research and literature that exists about innovation, ideas still take up the vast majority of the attention as the leading factor behind successful innovations. Because ideas are the sexy part of innovation, many believe that a novel idea is an innovation itself; it is not. More importantly, just because something is novel doesn’t mean it will win in the marketplace.

Do ideas matter?…

It’s hard to get excited about incremental ideas

in Innovation

Most of what is called innovation is incremental in nature. Meaning, an improvement on something that already exists. This is innovating within a known box. Microsoft is company that is the poster boy for this type of behavior. It’s a shame because they invest a lot of money on R&D but not much of its inventions become innovations.

Except for the XBOX and Kinect, in the last decade or so, many of its products have been plain vanilla copies of other products that reached the market first. Why the XBOX? Because it was a product of intrapreneurship within Microsoft.

Right now intrapreneurship is a hot topic and a rich source of potential advantage for corporations. In a recent Innochat session we touched on some of the points about intrapreneurship: Being an intrapreneur.

Large consultancies have also taken notice, as recent study by Accenture about developing an entrepreneurial culture found that:…