How Management Innovation Happens - MIT Sloan Review

An insight article from Julian Birkinshaw and Michael Mol from the London School of Economics in which they suggest companies need to understand the four typical stages of the management innovation process. According to the authors, few companies understand how such innovation occurs and how to encourage it and thus to foster new management ideas and techniques, companies first need to understand the process of management innovation. This article outlines those processes and stages..

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Seeking Common Ground in Conversations Can Stifle Innovation and Reward the Wrong People : Research: Stanford GSB

The best baseball players don't always get elected All-Stars. And the Nobel Prize doesn't always go to the most deserving member of the scientific community. This, according to a pair of recent studies, is because such recognition can depend upon how well known an individual is rather than on merit alone. Moreover, because it's human nature for people to try to find common ground when talking to others, simple everyday conversations could have the unfortunate side effect of blocking many of the best and most innovative ideas from the collective social consciousness. "In our research, we found that people are most likely to talk about things they think they have in common with others, rather than topics or ideas that are more unusual or striking," said Nathanael J. Fast, a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Fast is one of three authors of the paper "Common Ground and Cultural Prominence: How Conversation Reinforces Culture," with Chip Heath of the Stanford Business School, and George Wu of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. "This has the effect of reinforcing—or even institutionalizing—the prominence of familiar cultural elements over ones that are perhaps more deserving."

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Creative Technologist – Division of labor vs the return of the generalist? - Anders Wahlquist - CATScan - Creativity Online

What happens to roles as a small technology organisation evolves and grows from B-Reel co-founder Anders Wahlquist Starting B-Reel 11 years ago, we three founders had clear roles. Petter [Westlund, left]: designer, programmer, motion artist; swiss army knife in all things digital production. Pelle [Nilsson, center]: producer, director. Swiss army knife in all things TV and TVC production. Anders [Wahlquist, right]: business / key account. Swiss army knife all things Sales / HR / Business / legal / admin. Like a cell structure B-Reel has since developed organically looking for people beeing very allroundish. Generalists. Basically we have been happy with that. People overlap. Starting projects, we brought the whole team to the brief and collected ideas from all angles. Team effort.

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Candour - Simon Cowell's Managerial Legacy - Harvard BR Dan McGinn

I woke up this morning feeling guilty, ready to admit a journalistic lapse: I watched only about five minutes of last night's marathon season finale of "American Idol." That's partly because I've never liked the show, and partly because both the Red Sox and Celtics were playing on other channels. But I'd meant to tune in last night to watch Simon Cowell's swan song. Even though I'm no "Idol" fan, I've always thought Cowell's style, while over-the-top, is relevant for managers. Cowell rose to fame and fortune on the basis of his brutal honesty, ignoring conventions of politeness to give candid feedback. Yes, he's unnecessarily mean and nasty — hey, it's a TV show — but he's also one of the world's foremost practitioners of a word that pops up in HBR every so often: candor.

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Using rivalry to spur innovation - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Innovation

Business leaders tend to raise their eyebrows when they read about parallels between history and modern management—and for good reason. There are undoubtedly many people who offer better leadership lessons than Attila the Hun, and it is unclear whether Alexander the Great can tell us much about business strategy. So it’s with some trepidation that we set forth the premise of this article: that the Italian Renaissance was such an extraordinary period of creativity it can shed light on how to stimulate business innovation.

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