Innovation Excellence The World's Most Popular Innovation Web Site

Is it disruptive? Is it innovative? Two meaningless questions. Two questions to stop asking. More strongly, stop using the words “disruptive” and “innovative” altogether. Strike them from your vocabulary and replace them with novel, useful, and successful.

Two words to live by: Critical Path. If you can’t work the critical path, don’t work on anything. Working on a non-critical path task is worse than working on nothing.

If you want to make a difference, you’ve got to add energy. And the more you can add the bigger difference you can make.

Companies don’t need more ideas, they need ideas that are more meaningful. Companies have plenty ideas because they measure and track the number of new ideas generated. Meaningful ideas are, by definition, understood by a few and misunderstood by the rest. It’s lonely to advance an idea that most don’t understand.

With Innovation, things aren’t always what they seem. And the culprit for all this confusion is how she goes about her work. Innovation starts with different, and that’s the source of all the turmoil she creates.

All innovation projects take longer than expected and take more resources than expected. It’s time to change our expectations. With regard to time and resources, innovation’s biggest enemy is waiting. There. I said it.

Innovation creates things that are novel, useful and successful. Something that’s novel is something that’s different, and something that’s different creates uncertainty. And, as we know, uncertainty is the enemy of all things sacred.

Today’s commercial environment is fierce. All companies have aggressive growth objectives that must be achieved at all costs. But there’s a problem – within any industry, when the growth goals are summed across competitors, there are simply too few customers to support everyone’s growth goals.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless it’s perturbed by an external force. And, it’s the same with people – we keep doing what we’re doing until there’s a reason we cannot.

Evaluation of innovation efforts is a hot topic. Sometimes it seems evaluating innovation is more important than innovation itself. Metrics, indicators, best practices, success stories – everyone is looking for the magical baseline data to compare to in order to define shortcomings and close them. But it’s largely a waste of time, because..