Making Innovation Happen
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 04:31PM This is the story of how we used open source principles at Red Hat to develop a new workflow for our technical support staff based on collaboration. There are two key parts to the story: discussing the process we used to develop our new collaborative work flow, and an overview of that new collaborative work flow itself.
Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:33AM Companies that address their organizational weaknesses as they implement growth strategies give themselves an advantage.
Most senior managers pay close attention to the strategic side of growth—the “wheres,” “whens,” and
“hows.” Yet many underestimate the importance of organizational factors in translating a growth strategy into reality. This oversight can dampen a company’s growth plans: organizational processes and
structures that are well suited to today’s challenges may well buckle under the strain of new demands or
make it impossible to meet them. Likewise, key employees may lack the skills needed to cope with the additional complexity that growth brings. By reviewing the experiences of three organizations that faced the stresses imposed by new growth initiatives, this article seeks to illustrate such “pain points” and
suggests some approaches for coping with them.
Click here to read the article in full.
See how the Management Innovation Index supports and assists the premise of this article
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 07:30PM An interesting new paper in the Provocation Series from NESTA UK entitled "The State of Uncertainty - Innovation Policy Through Experimentation" explores the notion of innovation policy and concludes rather naively in my view "the basic problem that constrains innovation, and the main resource that propels it, is uncertainty and its resolution. This should be the focus of innovation policy. Our proposal suggests both a more powerful strategy and potentially also a more cost effective one than the traditional approach. But it will require that innovation policy be introduced, and applied, in a scientific (learning-focused) rather than political (influence-based) frame of mind." Two problems with this conclusion.
Sunday, May 15, 2011 at 01:52PM Here is an article from the Financial Times that provides some insight to the thinking of business schools and business management education. There are two biaises in this article you need to consider whilst you are reading it. The first is that those working in business schools are not in business. They are in the education industry and a very specific part of the education industry. In the main their concern is not the concerns of business. Business is concerned with risk, entrepreneurship and free markets. Business schools operate in a regulated environment, a regulated market where risk has been removed by the very construct of the industry. Further business is revolves around entrepreneurial behaviour. Business schools and their personnel completely lack those skills. Business school personnel work at business schools because they don't like, desire or most importantly feel the need to develop entrepreneurial skills.
Friday, May 13, 2011 at 10:10AM One of the odd paradoxes of organizational change is that all the initiatives companies undertake to support major transformations—learning programs, structural changes, communications plans and the like—can actually prevent effective change as much as enable it. The enemy is time. It may take months to bring a team on board to design and execute a change program, then several more months to make the transition to a new way of working. By that time, who can be sure the initiative is even relevant to the real business issues of the day? Maybe, instead, the change program ends up being more like last year’s fashions—handsome and well crafted, but out of date.
