Tag Archives: Innovation

From noticing to insight

in Creativity, Innovation

There are a lot of ways to have insights, from quieting your mind to cultivating happiness all around you. Yet it doesn’t stop there, these are conditions that contribute to having insights. But what about active insight recognition?

That’s where observation comes in. Engaging one’s attention, not just seeing, contributes to the ability to make distinctions and then wondering why those distinctions exist.

For example have you noticed that some people, especially women, sit very close to the wheel of the car as if almost driving with their teeth? This can be attributed to many things such as their height, but that’s not entirely true. Elderly people come to mind when thinking about this but they have  some physical limitations such as strength, shortsightedness and height. So why do some people drive almost with their teeth?

I don’t have a clear answer but simply asking ‘why’ will lead me to an answer, an insight.

This is the secret of noticing: Spotting things that don’t make sense, that defy expectation. And once you notice a cluster of patterns, ask why this pattern or more specifically: “Hmm, I wonder why that is?”

The better you become at noticing things and then seeking out the truth, the more insights you’ll have and the more interesting the world will become to you. As a by product you’ll also become more interesting to other people 🙂

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Innovation posts of the week: Do companies need less innovation?

in Must reads of the week

Want more? You can find more innovation posts in my Delicious bookmarks account, all good stuff!

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If a person is not innovative with self, can she be innovative in an organization?

in Innovation

Good question from yesterday’s post:

The process of innovation is full of highs and lows and requires people to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone so I think it depends on a . It basically comes down to mindset, Carol Dweck has written extensively about how there are people with a . If you look around you’ll see that we’re mostly surrounded by people with fixed mindsets, people who are afraid to be wrong and make mistakes. Where innovation requires a learning disposition, people with fixed mindsets have a hard time accepting the idea that ‘.

What we need to do is come to a collective understanding that failure will happen along the journey of any new initiative and , this way we can change the perception of failure from ‘failing to learning’.

Below is Professor Carol Dweck explaining the difference between a growth and fixed mindset:

P.S Be sure to click on the links (), it’s stuff I’ve written about before as well as ideas taken from elsewhere but they all come back to the growth vs fixed mindset.

I look forward to your thoughts Smile

Do companies need less innovation?

in Innovation

This is a guest post by Ralph Ohr in response to an article posted on Business Week titled: Why Companies Need Less Innovation.

Thanks for this valuable post.

Although, I just partly agree with the author, the post has greatly initiated an important discussion. The definition of what innovation means in a certain context as well as the resulting question who is responsible to drive the defined scope, turn out to be crucial for innovation success.

As already indicated in former comments, the author tends in his understanding of innovation to focus on the more radical part of the continuum. This part is primarily driven top-down, requires dedicated processes in place and depends on the allocation of selected resources. Leadership needs to assure these pre-conditions, together with a proper link between company’s strategy and innovation. Otherwise, aligned activities and targeted resource management is likely to fail. Arie Goldshlager has well pointed out that an innovation chain is likely to be just as strong as its weakest link.

But there is also innovation at the opposite part of the continuum. I would like to refer to a great post by James Todhunter (@jamestodhunter): In defense of improvement

He pinpoints the importance of improvements for incremental innovation. Improvements typically emerge from daily business and are driven bottom-up by employees in their respective field besides doing their day-to-day job. This is particularly important as incremental innovation usually accounts for the majority of activities to the overall innovation portfolio.

In this sense, everybody in a company is basically in charge to contribute to the development of the company in order to stay competitive – closeness to daily business and time horizon might be different. If we consider innovation to cover a continuum, ranging from incremental to radical purpose, it’s essential that leaders understand that both end of this continuum require different approaches, incl. objectives, mindset, resources and processes.

I don’t think companies need less innovation – I rather think, companies should focus on contributing to innovation at the right point of the continuum.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Regards, Ralph-Christian Ohr

Innovation posts of the week: Why companies need less innovation

in Must reads of the week

Want more? You can find more innovation posts in my Delicious bookmarks account, all good stuff!

How to create a new business model

in Creativity, Innovation, Strategy

Competition in industries is essentially competition between business models. A recent , which led to a post about the , reminded me of a great creative exercise to help you look at your and other industry’s dominant business model as a lego kit.

You can then break them down and, like a builder, reconnect them like building blocks to create new business concepts.…