Many organisations try to increase innovation by copying the successful techniques of other firms. This rarely works. Instead, you need to develop your purpose first. It’s this underlying philosophy that drives success, not tools.
There are three ways to develop a disruptive innovation: find a 10X performance improvement, innovate the business model, or re-imagination. Here is a case study of how to use design thinking to achieve a radically re-imagined product.
The most important phrase in innovation is “this might not work.” If there isn’t a risk, we’re not innovating.
Tacit Knowledge and Why It’s Important There is a mining CEO in Australia who often says in private conversation something like: When it comes to new ideas, we’re anxious to be second They want to use a fast follower strategy. And there’s some sense to this approach. After all, trying to be first is risky. […]
I’ve seen a lot of startup pitches recently, and it seems like founders are obsessed with features. I don’t care about your features. Tell me how you’re going to create value instead. Here is how to think about that.
Every innovative idea has some risk in it. But sometimes, with higher risk we can find unusually high rewards. For a lot of innovators, we need to be aiming higher.
If we try to completely protect ourselves from failure, we’ll never learn. And if we don’t learn, we don’t grow. To grow, we have to take risks, and we have to mess up. If we learn from this, we’ll be ok.
Creative people are different from you and me, right? Well, no. David Burkus dispels this myth and nine more in his excellent new book The Myths of Creativity. This holds important lessons for how to organise our firms to help them be more creative.
After a string of innovation failures, LEGO nearly went out of business in 2003. Brick by Brick tells the story of how this happened, and how LEGO turned things around to become an innovation powerhouse again. There are some broad lessons that can be learned from this story.
Innovation depends on insight. But many of the practices and habits within our organisations actually inhibit generating insights. In Seeing What Other Don’t, Gary Klein offers some ideas for overcoming these obstacles, and for generating novel insights.
What to Amanda Palmer and WordCamp have in common? Both are built on powerful communities. There are some lessons for business in this.
