Combining Ideas – a Key to Innovation - Tim Kastelle, School of Business the University of Queensland

One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and innovations within your organisation. These act together to create non-linear feedback loops which make the change process nearly impossible to predict or manage. How do we manage this? The act of innovation consists of combining ideas in new ways, and then executing the this new combination effectively (If you’re nerdy, I’ve got a fairly technical model of how this works in the paper I wrote with Jason Potts & Mark Dodgson for this year’s DRUID Conference). One of the ways that we deal with the complexity we face is by innovatively connecting ideas.

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Closing the Alignment Gap - Strategy and Operations in the Enterprise

A new study by Forbes Insight, in associatioin with SAP show executives clearly agree that aligning strategy and operations is essential to their companies’ success, but many organizations still face significant barriers that may prevent them from achieving this. Executives on both sides of the strategy/operations aisle are concerned that strategic priorities may be out of sync with operational realities, in particular in critical areas such as risk management and talent allocation and retention. Intensifying this split are the sudden shifts companies have had to make to deal with the impact of the global recession and resulting economic volatility.

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The 4 Best Ever Harvard Business Press Articles on Strategy as Selected by ther Creative Leadership Forum

Harvard Business Press worked through the last decade collating what they saw as the best articles on strategy and ended up with 1o. We chose what we believe to be the top 4.

Read these and you will have a good basic understanding of what strategy is from a theoretical perspective.

The Core Competency of the Corporation by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel

Leading Change - Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter

Innovation: The Classic Traps by Rosabeth Moss Kantor

What Makes a Leader by Daniel Goleman

All 10 have been edited into a nice compilation that can be purchased from Harvard Business Press. Click here to see the list of the 10 articles and to place an order..

Key Learning Strategies for the New Millenium

First, training was, and still is, a way to support learning. Training is not the only way to learn, and it often is not the best way. Second, the need for learning is not going away; it is increasing. Every time an individual or group encounters something new, there is an opportunity, and often a requirement, to learn. This can be a new job, a new task, a new business strategy, a new customer, a new product, a new competitor behavior, and so on. Third, we can take a systematic, performance-based approach to managing learning, not just training, in our organizations.

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The Importance of Convergence Between Leadership, Strategy and Communications

This new study from Forbes Insights with 163 CEOs, senior strategists and communication professionals closely analysed the interdependence of strategy and communications in getting a strategy right and bringing it to a succesful result.

Among the key findings

- Senior management does not have a common definition of what strategy is ata conceptual level

- Management tends to be over optimistic about the success of strategies

- There are five common results for failure and 82% of failures are preventable

Click here to download the report in full