Monthly Archives: September 2010
What we call something has a significant impact on our perceptions. If you don’t start a project when you or someone else thinks you should, labeling it “procrastination” places a lot of negativity squarely on your shoulders. “Procrastination” can suggest laziness, hesitation, lack of responsibility, and indifference. Any of these individually (or collectively) represent a heavy burden; this burden makes it even more difficult to be creative and productive when you need to be. While in school, and beating myself up more than I do now, I would have readily labeled myself a procrastinator. Many nights I wrote papers for next-day classes or began intense studying for tests right before they were to be given. Doing this never hurt the results though, since I earned strong grades throughout school. With experience, however, it’s clear making progress on every project won’t begin right away. Many really important projects will seem as … Continue reading
Far too often, we in the innovation space are interested in creating a really interesting new product, rather than thinking about the product in the context of its use or experience. It was during a car trip with some new friends at Pure Insight when we were talking about daily rituals that I realized what a powerful “lens” rituals could be for focusing on new innovation opportunities. We happened to be talking about shaving – in this case, the drudgery of waking up every day to scrape the bristles from our faces (our correspondents happened to be men. I’ll assume women think the same way about shaving their legs, etc). While we complained about the task, the discomfort, the risk of cuts and so forth, we also came to the realization that each of us has a specific ritual about the way they approach shaving, and for the …
Above is a Wordle of my notes from the 2-day BIF-6 summit. I’m not surprised to see that “people” is the largest word; because more than innovation or technology, it’s what people do that matters the most. Find Your Place The second day of the conference started with Richard Leider, Founder and Chairman of The Inventure Group, who has studied the power of purpose for 40 years. He looks at what makes people get out of bed in the morning. When the elderly are asked what they would do differently in their lives, it came down to three themes: 1) be more reflective, 2) take more risks (authenticity and voice), 3) understand own bottom line/what matters to me. Leider says that the two most important days in your life are the day that you are born and the day that you discover why you were born. “I arise in the … Continue reading
Tim and I have recently edited a network focused issue of a journal called Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice. The really pleasing outcome from the submissions was the wide variety of applications that network analysis was having in the study of innovation management. We received papers from Asia, Europe and Australia and the overall standard of the submissions was very good. My favorite paper in the special issue was written by Sandra Ohly (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Robert Kase and Miha Skerlavaj (both University of Ljubijana, Slovenia). It’s an important piece of work because they start from the premise that innovation is a process with different stages rather than being a singular event. We’ve written about the significance of looking at innovation as a value chain and the Ohly et al paper is entirely consistent with this. Different parts of the innovation process must be managed differently but your ability to … Continue reading
What’s your strategy for starting meetings? Here’s an innovative variation on the standard strategy of starting a meeting by re-stating an objective to ensure everyone present understands why they NEED to be present. One of our clients shared that their company expects each meeting to begin with a statement of what the meeting will mean for customers. Especially in larger companies where it’s easy for staff members to go for extended periods without ever seeing a customer, this is an important strategic way to bring the customer into every group discussion. While our client didn’t mention the practice, a valuable closing strategy for meetings would include a check at the end about the customer implications (and especially benefits for customers) resulting from the meeting and the collective time invested in the meeting by the participants. What do you think about this meeting strategy? Do you do this or a similar … Continue reading
A consistent point of controversy is whether or not innovation can be managed. If you think of innovation only as generating new, novel ideas, then it is very difficult to see how this could be actively managed (although there are in fact things we can do to encourage and improve creative thinking, so even here there is some scope for managing). On the other hand, if you view innovation as a process that includes steps such as generating, selecting, executing and diffusing ideas, then it is a bit easier to see how it might be managed. Part of the problem here is how we define management. If we view it only as control, then it is hard to manage innovation because control will stifle the creativity needed at the front end of the process. However, if we view the main job of managers as enabling, or removing obstacles, then managing … Continue reading
