Making Innovation Happen
Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 03:49PM Business transformation is now a continuous process most companies have not mastered. In this article from the well regarded Booz@Co strategy+business magazine, partners from Booz&Co offer a framework that can assist organisations in this vital process.
Monday, July 5, 2010 at 02:02PM The Design of Business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, by Roger Martin was a positive surprise as it was a quick read, well structured, delivered several interesting concepts and some in depth cases on design thinking and business model innovation. Even though several of the cases are familiar for many readers (such as P&G, Apple, Cirque du Soleil, McDonalds and RIM) Roger, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, professor of strategic management, and author of the book The Opposable Mind, adds interesting perspectives and sometimes information from behind the scenes working as a consultant and advisor. The book is an extension of Roger's popular article (free download) from 2004 with the same name. The book in three bullet points: * It introduces and explores the concept of the "Knowledge Funnel" describing how knowledge advances from mystery to heuristic, to algorithm for businesses to gain efficiency and lower costs, and the activities of moving across the knowledge stages (exploration) and operating within each knowledge stage (exploitation).
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 09:20AM It’s almost that time of year again. Strategic planning teams all over the world will gather behind closed doors in a vain attempt to predict the future – except for the visionary ones who are saying “Enough!” They have realized that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is, well, simply crazy. Remember the first James Bond movie you ever saw? Regardless of who was playing 007, you couldn’t help but be swept up as he outgunned and outsmarted the bad guys and saved the day. Now think of the last James Bond movie you saw. Did it give you the same thrill? Or did you almost fall asleep? It’s not the actor, or the mind-numbing car chases and explosions to blame. It’s the fact that we’ve seen it all before, year after year, we know how it ends. We’re left feeling vaguely unsatisfied, hoping for something more substantial.
Sunday, June 27, 2010 at 09:08PM My Stanford colleague Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao and I have been leading an executive program at Stanford every November for the past four years that is called Customer-focused Innovation. In the mornings, we discuss the theory and practice of innovation with the executives. In the afternoon's, Perry Klebhan from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (which everyone calls the Stanford d.school) leads the group as they go out into the world to try to tackle read world problems -- such as improving the experience of visiting a gas station or buying a car. For this program, Huggy and I put together a list of 21 evidence-based ideas about how great bosses lead innovation. We would love to hear your ideas about ways great bosses spark innovation as well a concerns -- and extensions -- related to these ideas: 1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.
Sunday, June 27, 2010 at 08:56PM A kid raised in a blue-collar home in Los Angeles, who got into trouble in school, who managed to scrape his way into an acting and directing career, and then went on to create a world-renowned film festival that changed the fortunes of independent filmmakers . . . . . . Even a person like that, even a person like Robert Redford, can screw it up. Redford's faults: hiring badly, impatience, inability to communicate, ineffective relations with subordinates. He laid them all out Thursday before an audience of about 300 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at a seminar sponsored by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and by Towers Watson & Co., a human resources consulting firm. "I kind of stumbled into business," Redford said, sitting comfortably in an armchair on stage and speaking on the topic "Cultivating a Creative Workforce."
