in Innovation, Leadership
Creating the conditions for innovation to happen is at the top of the agenda for any leader, but in many organizations, innovation is more of a word used between sentences than an outcome. In other organizations, innovation happens in spite of outdated beliefs and structures because someone choose to not play by the rules. In innovative organizations, on the other hand, innovation is business-as-usual; it is a mindset.
Which begs the question, what does a culture of innovation look like? …
Radically better products don’t stand on the shoulder of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed. – Eric Schmidt
Indeed. Scrappy startups are known for acting with speed and conviction, while established organizations are slow and risk averse. When implemented well, speed and surprise are the ultimate equalizers. To achieve surprise, you need an unexpected idea first. Second, you need to have the ability to execute that idea. Third, you need to decide when and how to execute the idea.
It is at the moment of making the decision where most established organizations fail. Why? Because most large organizations don’t empower their employees to make decisions.…
I’m sure you’ve been in meetings where everyone worries about competition more than they worry about customers. It is a fact that for traditionally run businesses, any talk about strategy quickly shifts to competition. It’s unavoidable and it pisses me off. Traditional business practice is based on beating the competition, which assumes that there is competition that looks and plays just like you if you are starting a business. …
For as long as I can remember, I’ve adopted new products and services when they are just starting out. It’s very common that I get requests to “try this and that” for startups looking for early adopters and beta testers. As such, my main objective in adopting products and services that are in beta is the following:
It’s rare that I come across other people who do the same, most adopt a new product or service only once it’s become part of the daily conversation. Unfortunately, the same applies to wannabe innovators…
This is the classic case of being an early adopter. But there is a distinction between adopter and adapter: innovator’s aren’t the early adopters, they are the early adapters.
BIG ideas get all the attention by the media, bloggers, journalists and the like because Big ideas, like anything that is coming out of Google X, have the possibility to create waves of change for society.
Businesses that want to call their latest and greatest invention the next best thing should be thoughtful about what it is they are promoting. Though we can all tell BIG from SAME, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs calling their latest venture The New Thing; frankly most of the time it isn’t.
So, to determine whether or not something is really The New Thing we can use the following criteria: it’s new, surprising and radically useful.
The more precise one is about what “innovation means and looks to us”, the more focused the efforts will be and thus the more interesting one becomes. From a business relevance standpoint, beyond the media coverage one gets, thinking and doing big has other benefits as well:…
in Innovation, Leadership
While most everyone has their own perspective about what makes up a solid foundation for innovation inside organizations, one of the key ingredients necessary for innovation to happen in any type of environment is freedom.…
in Innovation, Leadership
Throughout this past year, I’ve been having conversations with innovation leaders from a couple of BIG companies about re-inventing their innovation capability. The pattern of conversation: we’ve had a good run, but feel that our process for making innovation happen is delivering incremental results. Bureaucracy has developed, and so we aren’t taking a lot of risks anymore. How do we shake ourselves out of it?
This is a classic situation of the initial innovation enthusiasm becoming stagnant because innovation’s main killers are not kept at bay: GroupThink and ExpertThink.
One leads to consensus, and the other to unchallenged best practices. In combination both lead to stagnation. Later on, it will become more difficult to innovate because silence and fear will become the norm. Then you will really have a challenge in your hands!…