Tag Archives: Innovation
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Innovation
in Innovation
Here are HBR’s 10 must read articles on innovation. No need to buy, although you can if you want to, as I’ve compiled the PDF’s for each article right here. Just click on the link and voila!…
The Innovators DNA: Interview with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen
A few weeks ago, I got the chance to interview the authors of the bestselling innovation book, The Innovator’s DNA. Below is the transcript of what I was able to record from our call.
Before, here is short bio of each author:
Hal Gregersen is the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Chair of Innovation and Leadership at INSEAD and Jeff Dyer is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at BYU’s Marriott School of Management. They are co-authors of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators and most recently worked together on Innovator’s Accelerator, an online executive education experience designed to develop individuals’ and organizations’ innovation skills.…
Future-proofing: Asking questions that anticipate great challenges
in Innovation, Leadership
This is a short post, but I really want to bring attention to this issue because uncertainty is the norm, and we all have to deal with it. How do we do that?
There is no right answer.
But, to start, we have to be conscious about it. Then, we have to make an effort to look at what isn’t there and formulate what could be. To do this, we can start by asking better questions. This is the same dilemma Clay Christensen was in when he was studying disruption. Because he knew that a primary task of leadership is asking questions that anticipate great challenges, to be able to help business leaders better deal with uncertainty and its many challenges, he had to start asking better questions himself.
So, here’s how he figured out how to start asking better questions (last paragraph):…
Template mentality does not equal innovation
in Creativity, Innovation
Well, well, well. My rant about innovation consultants hit a nerve. In particular, I liked this response from Roger von Oech:
.@jorgebarba Some consultants read a few #innovation books, call themselves experts w/o conceiving & implementing new ideas, or risking $.
— Roger von Oech (@RogervonOech) April 15, 2013
The problem with reading books and then going out and suggesting what they say to do, is that by the time those books come out, the techniques or strategies that they suggest are already a best practice. And, you already know what I think about “best practice thinking”. Also, business books don’t really teach you how to think. At best, they tell you what to think. On top of that, humans are not very good at understanding context. What works in Cancun is not going to work in New York. There are cultural differences, even within countries.
Another issue I see, is that templates, like all ideas, reach their expiration date:
Is your car from 1985? Porter’s strategy tools are. Time for an oil change. @bizdesignsummit
— Alex Osterwalder (@AlexOsterwalder) April 15, 2013