Tag Archives: Innovation

Innovation Book review: Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

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stoking innovation bonfire book

I had the opportunity to receive an advanced copy of  Braden Kelley’s (@innovate) new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire a few weeks ago and I just finished reading.

While other books take a more high level approach to innovation, what I noticed is different with Braden’s book is his focus on eliminating the obstacles that prevent innovation from happening in an organization. This approach is easier to digest for the layman because it’s focused on anticipating problems they’ll immediately relate to as opposed to other books that take a more ‘big ideas’ approach. And there’s not a lot of the jargon that plagues other books on innovation.

The book has easy to follow checklists, summaries and simple to understand innovation use cases that you can come back to and won’t lose a beat. It covers the important stuff such as how to embed innovation into your organizational culture and how to sustain it.

Braden also added useful frameworks at the end of the book to provide the reader a solid road map to start with. It’s this practical approach that gives the book it’s value. You’ll just get it!

Whether you work in a big or small organization, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is a must read for both novice and experts alike. And with the need to get educated in the art of innovation and making it an integral part of your organization, Braden’s book should be on your reading list. Go get it!

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Innovation posts of the week: Organizational Innovation

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On happiness and value innovation

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I’ve been thinking about and pounding you in this blog with (also see ). I found out two things today, one is that I’m not the only one thinking about it, and, second that recent research says that in order for people to be happy they like to spend a certain amount of time on some activities.

Here are the so-called according to the research:…

Should everyone in a society be innovative?

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Here’s a comment posted by Kate Davis in response to my post from last week:

This almost makes me wonder if we want all people to be innovative? I know that being innovative is a goal and a highly valued quality, but you as you said, the copy-cat aspect of human nature is required for our continued survival. I suppose the question truly is "Should everyone in a society be innovative?" Yes, being a stick-in-the mud is probably not good if the society wants to be dynamic, a definite plus for the society’s probability for surviving.
I will have to think on this more, but as with every observation I see, I think the "why" is almost always more important than the "what."

 

Here’s my response and I welcome your thoughts:

Yes it’s an interesting question but I would frame it another way: Do we want everyone in society to fulfill their potential? If the answer is yes, then being innovative becomes a desirable quality because that’s ‘what’ innovation really is. If you have the desire to become better consistently all the time you stand a better chance of innovating because you’re a lot more open to new things, new experiences, new ideas and have a higher tolerance for failure.

What do you think?

To understand your customers needs you must become them

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Do you really know your customers? Are you sure you understand their needs, wants, desires and motivations? Most likely you don’t.

Why do I know this? Because most organizations are not designed to ‘become their customers’. For an example of what I mean read this NPR article on how: To Understand Truckers, Two Photographers Become Truckers.

About two years ago, he and his wife Tracey Mancenido, also a photographer, decided to drop their lives, attend a truck driving school, and then hit the road. Tribble, the son of a truck driver, wanted to know more about the elusive culture that moves America — and figured the only way to understand it was to live it.

See that last sentence in bold? The only way to understand something is to live it. Bingo!

We’re in incredibly changing times, your customers wants and desires will also change to another value structure. Instead of assuming their wants and desires will always be the same, think the opposite. Just as the photographer did to understand truckers, you must remove the distance between you and your customers, immerse yourself in their environment and make their needs, frustrations and desires your own.

To discover new opportunities for innovation, you need to get under your customers skin and become them.

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Innovation posts of the week: Homophily the #1 enemy of innovation

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Insights first, ideas second

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I just want to add my thoughts to post earlier today: .

They sure are. There are all sorts of and . Do a google search for ‘how to get new ideas’ and you get , more links than you’ll ever have time to visit in your lifetime with some mostly the same information that is in those two articles I linked to! Ok so what’s a better way to generate ideas?

Insights, they’re the seeds of new groundbreaking ideas.

A more strategic way of generating ideas is to focus on building ideas on top of insights. Don’t get me wrong, thinking stuff up is fun. You let your imagination run wild, think of the impossible and think all kinds of stuff only you can imagine. It’s your own dream world! Mostly all these ideas will be way ahead of their time or not even doable. That’s why we need to combine our imagination with our intellect. Our intellect drives our capability to discover insights and our imagination helps put the pieces together in a new way.

So how do you discover new insights?

Recently I’ve written how and how . To discover new insights we have to become really good at and then making sense of them in this interconnected world. We must if you will and this happens by out of what we observe.

To get you started, a simple way is to observe the world, industries and people. Notice what’s changing, what’s different and ask yourself what does it mean for the world, industry your customers and you. Think about what needs and behaviors might emerge from these changes and how can you exploit them.

Ideas are cheap but insights are hard to come by.

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