Innovation Is Beyond Buzz | InnovationManagement - Stefan Lindegaard

Innovation. Just the word or term itself is enough to start heated discussions. I experienced this once more as I got some interesting comments from Scott Berkun and Ralph Kerle in response to my Why CEO’s Don’t Get Innovation post in BusinessWeek. One of Scott Berkun’s comments went like this “If we dropped the i-word, or at least attempted to define it, I think we’d get to the core of all this much faster.” This comment builds further on an interesting article, Good Beats Innovative Nearly Every Time, in which Scott urges us to loose usage of the word innovation.

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Getting the Best Out of Your People - Stop Telling Them to Get Outside the Box, Instead Tell Them About The Constraints..

A CEO friend of ours recently complained about the difficulty of keeping creativity alive in his business during this difficult period. He had previously cut back on "discretionary" spending—such as development of new products and marketing plans—in order to survive the Great Recession, and he hasn't yet seen his company's revenues bounce back enough to invest heavily in future growth. We told him he was nuts—that creativity is even more important in times when sales are harder to come by and customers are less loyal. We also told him that two separate research studies (one by Bain, the other by Booz Allen) showed long ago that market share gains made during bad times are more likely to stick than those made during growth periods. Despite our scolding, he still felt he couldn't afford to invest more resources to foster creativity, and simply had to get more from what little resources he had. So, could we help him or not?

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Emotional Commitment at Work - Bury My Heart in Conference Room B | Change This

From the latest Change This, a nice short presentation by Stan Slap of "slap" entitled Bury My Heart in Conference Room B - Emotional Commitment at Work

The Abstract

“A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended, and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.”

Employees First, Customers Second - The How of Management Innovation:Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ

Transforming an organization takes you on an interesting journey, without a map. There are wrong turns, surprising discoveries and moments of both exhilaration and discouragement. Not everyone agrees on the destination – at least in the beginning – much less on how to get there. When you reach an important milestone, you risk mistaking it for your goal. Instead of stopping at that point, you need to review what you’ve collectively learned – some of it the result of passionate debate – and continue on the quest to make your organization far better than ever seemed possible.

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Financing Risk and Bubbles of Innovation - Harvard Business School

Investors in risky startups who stage their investments face financing risk-that is, the risk that later—stage investors will not fund the startup, even if the fundamentals of the firm are still sound. We show that financing risk is part of a rational equilibrium where investors can flip from investing to not investing in certain sectors of the economy. We further demonstrate that financing risk has the greatest impact on firms with the most real option value. Hence, the mix of projects funded and type of investors who are active varies with the level of financing risk in the economy. We also highlight that some extremely novel technologies may in fact need "hot" financial markets to get through the initial period of diffusion. Our work underscores that financial markets may play a much larger and under-studied role in creating and magnifying bubbles of innovation in the real economy.

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