How To Think Small

John Baldoni, a regular Harvard Business Review contributor offers this small piece on how to think small. "At its core, innovation is applied creativity. A business owner can encourage creativity in employees by urging them to "think small." Encourage your people to find a solution to a problem, or a better way of doing things. But encouraging small innovations is just part of it -- a business owner must ensure that execution of the innovation is perfect. The announcement of Apple's iPad is turning many people's thoughts to the innovations behind big ideas. Innovations such as these play a critical role in a company's future, but companies often hinder themselves by focusing on finding the next big thing, when in reality, the next small thing might be more beneficial.

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How to be an Innovative, not just Business, Leader - David Magellan Horth

David Magellin Horth is one of the most highly experienced and knowledgeable creativity and innovation facilitators I know and have had the pleasure to work with.He is a global leader in the field of innovation thinking and his experimentation and design work around creativity and innovation processes and tools reaches back some 30 odd years. He is currently the President of the US Creative Education Foundation and his book The Leaders Edge is a standard text for all our programmes. So when he has an article published in Forbes, it would be remiss of me not to reproduce it fully for the Creative Leadership Forum readers.

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The 7 Key Components for Managing Creativity

I found this Fast Company article from 1997 quite fascinating. Click through and there is an even better article on the how to of designing creativity workshops. The MGTaylor mantra on managing for creativity goes something like this: All employees are inherently creative. That creativity is typically blocked by structural elements within a company. Eliminate the blockages, and you enable "group genius." In other words, you don't manage people; you manage the world in which they work, a world the Taylor's divide into seven key components, or domains.

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A Framework for Unblocking Organisational Creativity

Our research "Is Australian management creative and innovative?" clearly confirmed the statement in this FastCompany article which showed all employees are inherently creative and that creativity is typically blocked by structural elements within a company. So if you can eliminate the blockages, you enable "group genius." In other words, you don't manage people; you manage the world in which they work. Matt Taylor, a creativity consultant suggest their a seven key components, or domains to unblocking thse impediments,

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How to encourage big ideas - from MIT Sloan's School of Management

A new study suggests certain types of funding — which provide more freedom and focus less on near-term results — lead to more innovative and influential research. Scientists are much more likely to produce innovative research when using long-term grants that allow them exceptional freedom in the lab, according to a new study co-written by MIT economists. The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets. “If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study. “The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.” The results are contained in a working paper released this fall

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