Author Archives: Braden Kelley
A few years ago I came across this quote from Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo: “My job is to find the potential in something that others can not see, to secretly pour our resources into them and turn them into hits before anyone else catches on,” The quote was too long to fit in Twitter, so I thought I would share it here because I love the insight. This is the key to successful innovation captured in a single sentence. This quote also highlights one of the most important jobs of a CEO – to lead innovation: Continue reading
I had the opportunity to interview Christian Terwiesch, one of the co-authors of “Innovation Tournaments” about how to create and select exceptional opportunities. We also discuss a variety of other innovation topics including: barriers to innovation, education, and metrics. Professor Terwiesch teaches MBA and executive classes in the areas of operations management and product development at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Continue reading
The day after the lights went down on the World Business Forum 2009, the lights went up on an all day seminar with Gary Hamel across the street at the Time Life Building. It was great to be able to get down to the next level of detail below the talk that Gary gave at the World Business Forum 2009. Continue reading
What are the roadblocks and critical relationships between marketing and engineering in the cause of advancing innovation? Let me start off by recommending that you watch the movie I’ve embedded, as it does a great job of describing how there is often an engineering solution to a problem and a marketing solution to a problem. This in part explains why there is often a tension between marketing and engineering when it comes to new product development – they see different solutions, assign value differently, and view success in divergent ways. Continue reading
When I think about who should ‘own’ or manage innovation, and where it should reside in an organization, I believe the answer is obviously “It depends.” There cannot be a single answer for these questions because every organization’s strategy and specific culture of getting things done could be different. But, the one thing that I can say for sure is the following: Continue reading
Innovation is about change. Companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common – they are good at managing change. Now, change comes from many sources, but when it comes to innovation, the main sources are incremental innovation and disruptive innovation. Continue reading
When I first saw this topic I wanted to write about education innovation, but I resisted when a couple of the contributing authors chose this topic. I wrote about the publishing industry instead, but then in 2009 I came across a Phil McKinney article and had the opportunity to meet Sir Ken Robinson then too, and my passions for an education revolution were stirred. Continue reading
