Innovation Excellence The World's Most Popular Innovation Web Site

I’ve written and spoken about the importance of corporate culture and its impact on innovation over the last 15 years or so. Heck, one of the underlying issues I address in my book Relentless Innovation (shameless plug) is the overwhelming challenge that corporate culture presents to an innovation team. I’ve argued that corporate culture, more than any other issue, is the ...

In order to accelerate the pace of innovation and increase the amount of innovation that's done, we need to simplify it, or at least remove some of the uncertainty. To do that I'm going to argue in this relatively short post that innovation has three important deliverables:

We've positioned innovation incorrectly. Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers are ready to demand new products and services. We've positioned innovation as something to do to prepare for future business, future needs and future demands. Yet, innovation does answer these issues...

In strange and disappointing news, Lego announced that it was facing dire sales projections, with growth slowing from over 25% per year to low single digits. Strange, when just a few years ago Lego was on top of the world, with great new toys, Lego kits, Lego Robots and the Lego movies.

What if everyone in your company had to account for their time, and what if everyone had a specific time allocation for innovation? That might differ depending on the individual, their experience and interest in innovation of course, but what if at the end of each year you could look across your team and see how much time an individual spent building innovation skills and contributing to innovation projects. Wouldn't that be valuable as a manager?

Just yesterday while perusing the Twitter stream I saw a quote attributed to Jonathan Ive that made me want to sit up and scream. The quote was relatively straightforward and seems innocuous on its face...

Universities, businesses and even cities and regions are talking about innovation and the need to create accelerators or innovation enablers. To accelerate innovation, we need to do a couple of important things that are being overlooked or ignored.

Will we prepare our children to compete in a world where creativity and divergent thinking become more important than rote memorization? Can we rethink our business structures and processes to embrace more divergence and creativity?

You may think of Dubai as a place for tourism, or to see the tallest building, or to ski indoors on a 100 degree day, and you'd be right. But don't miss what they are doing to build an experimental platform for innovation as a city-state. The whole city and government are moving quickly and it will bear watching to see what's next.

The stark truth of platforms and ecosystems for B2B companies is that there will never be one dominant platform that everyone accepts and leverages. In fact there will almost always be several segmented platforms in any company or industry. This means there is real value in being a platform bridge or connector.