Innovation Universities Are Hot--Rotman, Ziba, IDEO, Continuum, Stanford, Institute of Design.

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum I just got off the phone with Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the U of Toronto, who told me that corporations are flocking to his institution to learn integrative thinking (design thinking). I've heard the same thing from innovation consultancies who are setting up their own "universities" to teach design thinking to corporate managers.

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Right Brain Workout - Telephone Booth - Creativity Test

This is a creativity test. We're going back to the days when the phone booth was about the only alternative to the desk phone. You're the president of a company that makes phone booths. Recently your closest competitor has begun to whittle away at your market share. Desperate, you ask all of your employees for ideas. Not just run-of-the-mill ideas, but innovative, creative ideas.

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Brazil to lead the BRIC economies in 2009

Let me start 2009 with a prediction - Brazil will lead the global emerging markets out of the current doldrums to be the top performing emerging market in 2009. Firstly, let's not forget that Brazilians have known terrible times. Military dictatorship and economic stagnation are recent memories for even the most prosperous, and there are still tens of millions of Brazilians who live on less than $1 a day. The horrible handling of money affairs put Brazil under the microscope of the International Monetary Fund who, in order to ensure repayment of loans issued by the World Bank, sent experts to Brazil, imposed austerity in public spending, tackled inflation by limiting wage increases, and confronted labour unions and non-governmental organisations.

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Why Don't Managers Think Deeply?

Jeffrey Immelt, GE's CEO, has received a lot of publicity recently for fostering "imagination breakthroughs" by encouraging managers to think deeply about innovations that will ensure GE's longer-term success. He has vowed that he will protect those working on the breakthroughs from the "budget slashers" focused on short-term success. Questions that this effort raises include: (1) Why so much publicity? (2) Isn't "deep thinking" what leaders are paid to do? and (3) Why do these kinds of effort require so much protection? In their new book, Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman suggest some answers to the questions.

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Web is an innovation playground: Chris Anderson

The future of Transformational Change within organisations will be highly dependant on the web...