Breaking Through Organizational Impediments To Innovation - an HR Industry Case Study

It has taken a decade for social media to finally deliver on its promise of democratising the work place. We might not have the paperless office but we certainly have free social media that poses a huge problem for the revenue, profitability and very existence of service driven organizations. The problem now for services organizations is not when to change but what to and how. This means organizational innovation is no longer an imperative. It is a must do. Yet, organizations find it extremely difficult to implement innovation as it requires strategic, tactical and behavioural change and to align those elements can be an Herculean task. This difficulty was highlighted recently when I was invited to a meeting with the MD of one of Asia-Pacific’s leading HR services companies. The MD has responsibility across all divisions for revenue, is passionate about innovation and recognizes the HR market is changing rapidly

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Creating, Growing, and Sustaining Efficient Innovation Teams - Casimer DeCusatis IBM Corporation, Poughkeepsie, NY

Economic forces such as the growing service economy and commoditization of traditional value chains have led many organizations to pursue breakthrough innovations as part of their business strategy. There has been an increased interest in collaboration and teamwork as catalysts of innovation, often without a clear understanding of the different kinds of teams that can be used to foster innovation or the kinds of team
building that will be most likely to yield desired results. The author describes a framework for innovation teams, ranging from highly structured to spontaneous, giving examples of how different kinds of teams relate to the characteristics of the next generation of innovators.

Read the full case study and see how it illustrates how one approach using preference profiling is more likely to yield tangible results from an innovation team.

Why large firms are often more inventive than small ones - Schumpeter: The Economist

SOME people say it is neither big nor clever to drink. Viz, a British comic, settled that debate with a letter from a reader who said: “I drink 15 pints a day, I’m 6 foot 3 inches tall and a professor of theoretical physics.” However, another question about size and cleverness has yet to be resolved. Are big companies the best catalysts of innovation, or are small ones better? Joseph Schumpeter, after whom this column is named, argued both sides of the case. In 1909 he said that small companies were more inventive. In 1942 he reversed himself. Big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. In a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off. These days the second Schumpeter is out of fashion: people assume that little start-ups are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. But that is a gross oversimplification, says Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. In a new report on “scale and innovation”, he concludes that today’s economy favours big companies over small ones.

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How Much Do We Need To Know or Should We Know - The Conference Board Review - James Krohe Jnr.

In twenty years of the Internet age, big companies have come to know more about their customers, their suppliers, and their own operations than they ever did, or could. Information pouring in from sensors and points of sale enables businesses to know how to sell things to shoppers before they know they want them, fix machines before they break, reorder stock before it runs out. “Big data,” which McKinsey trumpeted in March as “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” is in fact the previous frontier with a new name.

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The Evolved Self-management System | Conversation | Edge - Nicholas Humphrey

I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

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