Monthly Archives: February 2010
Over the past year, most of the banks I deal with have dropped the word ‘innovation’ from their mantra. It’s strange but true that the focus upon being innovative had been such a focal point during the 2000s and now it’s all over. To illustrate the point, the Top 10 American banks used the word innovation’ an average 1.2 times per annual report in 2000, rising to over six times per report by 2007.Heads of Innovation were popping up everywhere and innovation was the key to being different, attracting customers, growing business and increasing revenues.Now the Heads of Innovation have all gone and Innovation is at the bottom of the banks ‘to-do’ lists… in other words, the Heads have become Bottoms.Banks have realised that the last thing they want to be is innovative.They want to be boring.So innovation has disappeared over the parapets as fast as Tiger Wood’s pants.But that’s … Continue reading
There is no shortage of information circulating of late espousing the benefits of making yourself indispensable to your employer. While this mantra has clearly gained some traction, if not actually becoming quite popular, popular thinking does not necessarily equate to sound thinking. Let me be as clear as I can – nobody, and I mean nobody is indispensable. I don’t care who you are, what role you play, or what your title is. If you perceive yourself to be indispensable, you are setting yourself up for a very rude awakening. Furthermore, anyone who by design sets out to orchestrate a situation to make themselves indispensable is not operating in good faith. In today’s post I’m going to share my thoughts as to why the myth of becoming indispensable is very dangerous thinking to say the least…A well managed company does not allow itself to become dependent upon the performance of … Continue reading
“Mr. Edison, please tell me what laboratory rules you want me to observe?”by Janine de NysschenA good friend of mine once sat down to lunch with Stephen Covey and a group of fellow executives. During the course of the meal, one of the men commented on the unusual tablespoons, and said “Look at the backend of it.” All the people at the table flipped their spoons over, but my friend – quite unintentionally – angled it up so he could look at the bottom tip of it. Laughter ensued. But Covey raised a hand and pointed out that my friend’s actions suggested something interesting in his behavior: the ability to look at the world in an unexpected way. So I guess it’s not surprising to hear my friend is one of the most innovative entrepreneurs I know, as well as a successful millionaire who has transformed the industry he is … Continue reading
Open innovation will not only lead to new ways of making innovation happen. Innovation leaders and their executives will also experience side effects. I think most of these effects will be positive, but some will be mixed or perhaps even negative.As innovation leaders and their executives implement open innovation practices, they can just as well start figuring out how to deal with side effects of open innovation such as described below:Open innovation is very much about managing change. If a company can handle the change process related to implementing open innovation, then they have learned valuable lessons that can be used in change management situations. In the current and future business climate, I think everyone should appreciate working in an organization that is agile and prepared for changes.Often, the biggest enemy of innovation is the company itself as the company begin to focus more on its needs than the needs … Continue reading
With the proliferation of multi-touch technologies and innovations, we face an exciting new future of physical interactivity that will be like doing tai-chi.Will multi-touch become the mainstream interactive experience on small devices? The holy grail of touch interactivity is bringing together the simplicity of hand gestures with deep navigation. Will multitouch create a new user language much as we learn how to type? Imagine when multi-touch is deployed in home appliances such as washing machines and microwave ovens? Gestural commands can be much less obvious to users than those written on buttons and menus and can create a whole new set of challenges. It means more challenge for human factors people.It is interesting to envision how a broad-based, mass-scale utilization of the technology beyond the iPhone/iTouch/iPad/iDesk. I want to see a digital desk where there are no computers, the surface is the computer and my smartphone connects to the cloud. … Continue reading
by Kathy RobisonTwo weeks ago, I attended the Front End Innovation Europe Conference (FEI Europe) held in Amsterdam. One of the highlights was seeing the car in the picture above in person. Yes, they drove it into a large conference room inside the Hilton Hotel. It is the 2010 BMW Vision EfficientDynamics Concept car, and it is even more cool in person than in the photo. It’s BMW’s answer to the green car revolution. Though perhaps a little late to the game, I suspect it will eventually prove to be a huge success as they continue to do engineering with more style than most other car makers. In addition to seeing the car, we got to hear directly from Adrian van Hooydonk, the Director of Design of BMW Group and mastermind behind the group that developed the car. They clearly rose to the challenge of eloquently working Future Sustainability into … Continue reading
