Category Archives: Innovation

One question to help you innovate how you innovate

in Innovation

break out of your comfort zone to innovateHow do you innovate how you innovate? Easy, stop doing what worked before and start looking for insights outside the mainstream.

How?

Because I haven’t found any, and conduct them myself, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a short guide on how to conduct outside industry benchmarks for innovation. Part of this process is to consistently step out of your domain and learn how others approach similar business challenges; a few years ago I wrote about my experience at Disney Animation Studios.

The point of benchmarking outside your industry is to overcome the human tendency of letting what we know limit what we can imagine; to look outside your domain for inspiration.…

Innovation is not a process of checking tasks off a checklist

in Innovation

While the rest of the world clamors on how we are settling into an entrepreneurial economy and how their respective countries are building entrepreneurial ecosystems, there are other non-entrepreneurial habits that come with the territory: charlatanism.

I’ve called attention to this before, and I keep bumping into the same thing over and over again. There are quite a few people out there who are masquerading as innovators/entrepreneurs. A lot of them are nothing more than promoters/commentators /observers who take some known frameworks and play a game of plug-and-play.

For example, I recently talked to a guy who is forming a consultancy with another group of people (one of which who works in a government funded venture fund) to help entrepreneurs plan and execute their startup. Their plan is simple: help entrepreneurs fill out the business model and value proposition canvas for free, and then ask them for %5 of the company if they go ahead and launch.…

What is empathy?

in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Marketing

What is empathy?

 

What happens is that you get some very abstract conversations about what empathy is, nevertheless it is an interesting and important topic. Featuring Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Dr. Mary Hellen Immordino-Yang, Dr. Robert Weller, Dr. Adam Seligman, Leslie Jamison and Ben Doepke & the SEEK company.…

For innovation: Non-obvious needs are often the richest source of new insights

in Innovation

Innovation comes from leaving known shores and stepping into the unknown. This means being aware that you don’t have all the answers. So, you need to go out and discover new insights…

So, what’s an insight? Insights are unexpected shifts in the way we understand how things work.

They can be broken down into two categories:…

For innovation: Herd your black sheep

in Innovation
Cover of "The Incredibles [UMD for PSP]"

Cover of The Incredibles [UMD for PSP]

As you can discern from last week’s post about how not to drive a culture of innovation, as well as previous ones, I’m a big fan of “what not to do’s”. Well, in contrast to those, what are the counters to those NOT’s?

Let’s take the topic of success leading to failure…

Success breeds complacency because it hides problems, which eventually leads to failure. When success hides problems, what do you do?

You don’t repeat the same formula that worked for you before. Instead, you shake things up as Pixar’s Brad Bird did when taking on The Incredibles.

A few years ago, The McKinsey Quaterly asked: what does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? Apparently, a lot.…