The Days of "Manager Knows Best" Are Ending - Harvard Business Review

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow's young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today's young people think about communications. For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet, and if forced to choose, two-thirds would opt to have an internet rather than a car. This intense desire to be connected leads to a demand for greater flexibility: Two out of five people said they'd accept a lower-paying job if the position offered greater flexibility on access to social media, the ability to work from where they chose, and choice on the mobile devices they could use on the job. Tomorrow's young managers will share these attitudes, and workplaces will inevitably become more flexible.

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Creating, Growing, and Sustaining Efficient Innovation Teams - Casimer DeCusatis IBM Corporation, Poughkeepsie, NY

Economic forces such as the growing service economy and commoditization of traditional value chains have led many organizations to pursue breakthrough innovations as part of their business strategy. There has been an increased interest in collaboration and teamwork as catalysts of innovation, often without a clear understanding of the different kinds of teams that can be used to foster innovation or the kinds of team
building that will be most likely to yield desired results. The author describes a framework for innovation teams, ranging from highly structured to spontaneous, giving examples of how different kinds of teams relate to the characteristics of the next generation of innovators.

Read the full case study and see how it illustrates how one approach using preference profiling is more likely to yield tangible results from an innovation team.

5 Stupid Things Companies Do to Mess Up Their Innovation | Executive Street

Even after 20 years as an Innovation Management Consultant, I continue to be amazed at the failure rate of innovation. In fact, some studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of new product introductions fail. Maybe even more shocking is the fact that less than two percent of the 3,000 patents that are issued each week will ever reach market success. What’s interesting about all this is that most of the mistakes that cause these failures come from five basic screw-ups. The result is wasted time, wasted money, and, in some cases, wasted brand equity. So, what are these five mistakes?

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Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker

ANNALS OF IDEAS about brainstorming and creativity. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner of the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared all of his creative secrets. “Your Creative Power” was filled with a variety of tricks and strategies, but Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm.” The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important of these, Osborn said, was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution.

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Visualizing Creativity | Conspire: A Mindjet Publication

The ability to think creatively, and from that innovate, is a key skill in any business. Whether it’s sales, customer service, operations or management, being able to solve problems and develop new products and services is ultimately the difference between business success and failure. The challenges of creativity The very nature of creativity means that inspiration can strike seemingly at random, which can appear at odds with the organisation and accountability of business environments – yet trying to structure and manage the creative output will at times stifle the flow of ideas. Coupled with this are the constant demands of doing more with less;

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