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Every bold innovation involves messiness. The Chief Product Officer at Adobe reveals how to use it to succeed. In my work advising and consulting to some of the world’s most innovative companies, I see the best of the best practices for managing innovation. I also get a behind-the-scenes view of what really goes on during the innovation process itself–and…
DetailsThe best innovations reduce costs while adding value at the same time. With all the hype these days around the impending disruptions on the horizon such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and the like, it’s natural to assume that breakthrough innovation requires breakthrough technology. And if you consider the mind-boggling burn rates of recent innovation…
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The Management Consulting Industry is Booming, and it’s about to be Disrupted. This article originally appeared in Inc Magazine and later on upBOARD. Management consulting is a $250 billion industry. It’s big. It’s growing. It’s highly profitable. And it’s about to be disrupted. Whether the focus is strategy, operations, tax, finance, HR, or IT, business…
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Lean Start-Up. Rapid Iteration. Fast Cycle Times. Moving faster and cheaper when creating new products and services ideas is the name of the innovation game. Here’s how to do it like never before. A few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos voiced a dirty little secret about disruptive innovation: it’s not just about creating groundbreaking new…
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Disrupt or be Disrupted… Here are Five Business Model Strategies & Tools for Digital Innovation At some point every industry and every organization will face disruption. From retailers like Blockbuster and Borders Books to tech giants like Nokia and Blackberry, seemingly untouchable brands have been caught off guard by rapidly changing business landscapes. Your…
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Promoting a culture of innovation focused on business growth starts with providing practical tools that give anyone the opportunity to innovate in whatever they do. (Article based on the book, The Invisible Advantage) It’s one thing to say you want a culture of innovation. It’s another to actually get everyone truly innovating. We hear it…
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In large organizations, Innovation come from Intrapreneurs. Here are the 4 most common characteristics that entrepreneurs exhibit within companies. Intrapreneurs are these unique individuals or entrepreneurs working within your company who promote innovative products, ideas, systems or services – thus the ‘intra’. These employees could be sitting in any function within the organization and are…
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Sustained competitive advantage comes from innovating how we innovate. That’s the essence of real innovation. In the past, new products and technologies consumed the vast majority of the innovation air-time. That’s no longer the case. The most innovative companies today realize that competitive differentiation comes as much from how they innovate as it does from…
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It’s been a year since I wrote 6 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation for FastCompany. Since then, the article has received an incredible amount of social media sharing, including over 11k shares on LinkedIn alone. Why such a big response? Simple answer: We know the soft stuff is the hardest stuff to manage. While there isn’t a…
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Even before it goes on sale, Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators is a bestseller out of the gate. Here’s why the biggest business book of the year is indeed a compelling read – and how it falls short of truly innovating the topic of innovation. I’m like most techno-geeks. Anything with a battery turns me on.…
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Mainstream business culture penalizes women for being women. But “feminine” skill sets are the not-so-secret ingredients for what it takes to innovate in today’s digital world. When it comes to business, women get screwed. Women make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Only 25 CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women, a mere…
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What Types of Questions Push Thinking and Inspire Innovation? Pushing thinking to find breakthroughs and innovate is as much about asking the right questions as finding the right answers. CIO Insight recently published a great summary of 10 questions that can be used for leapfrogging mindsets to foster innovation: 1. Accentuate the Positive “What experiences…
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Why do we avoid uncertainty and surprise? Most leaders avoid uncertainty. Most organizations hate surprises. It makes sense. Predictability and control are the unquestioned holy grails of management. But could we be overlooking an essential and critical ingredient of breakthrough leadership and innovation? For example, every management book on Amazon with the word “surprise” in…
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What are the leadership competencies for disruptive innovation? Disruptive innovation is no longer the exception, it’s the rule. Just look at Blackberry, Blockbuster, Borders, and Kodak – all companies that missed opportunities to leapfrog to the next big thing. If we’re not proactively driving disruption, we’ll eventually need to react to it. Most leaders, however,…
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Does power hinder or help our ability to innovate? When it comes to innovation, we all know that open-mindedness, deferring judgment, including diverse inputs from diverse people, and fostering collaboration inside and outside the organization are all success factors when going for big ideas that will make a big difference. But recent research from USC’s…
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Magnum uses the Power of Surprise for Breakthroughs So you think ice cream is for kids? Try telling that to Unilever who sells over a billion Magnum ice cream bars a year – many to adults. Magnum’s wild success is based on using the “Power of Surprise” in its product innovation and marketing. In the…
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How does FEAR impact innovation? At many companies, there’s a lot of room for lip service, but little for real failure. We hear the catch phrases over and over: failure is necessary for success, we must fail faster to succeed sooner, and so on. But as soon as the possibility of actual failure arises, suddenly…
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Why Fighting Everyday Fires will Burn Down Your House I recently had the opportunity to provide a guest blog post on LeaderLab, one of the leading blogs focused on leadership, innovation and strategy. The post is titled Leading for Innovation: Why Fighting Fires Burns Down the House. Here’s an excerpt: Whereas innovation used to be…
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It’s tough to challenge assumptions and innovate when we have the same conversations with the same colleagues and about the same topics. So how do we stir things up to shift our mindsets, come up with new ideas and innovate? This video interview, conducted by Tad Milbourn, the host of Intuit’s Innovators Exchange, describes the…
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What lessons can we draw from times of scarcity and discipline to help us be more creative and innovative during periods of greater prosperity? During an economic downturn, it’s hard to think outside the bucks – let alone the box. We often jump to cost-cutting in an effort to preserve profits and cash flow. The…
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