We always feel badly for clients of a full-cycle innovation project. After the many ideation and co-creation sessions, there are far too many viable concepts to pursue. In many cases, millions of dollars of market expansion, new products with tested, validated appeal, and new licensing opportunities get swept aside just because there are too many possibilities.

Take risks. Leap into unknown and unexplored areas. Express yourself in new ways. Do these things to locate, validate, and capitalize on new areas of growth for your business. There are formal methods and processes for unlocking potential and manifesting new realities. We always tell clients to...

All adventures begin with a new map, just like the territory you charted in your business plans. You drafted this plan in the ardor of a visionary impulse, tempered with a will to thrive as you grow.

If a culture prohibits its people from progressing, pursuing their core passions, and seeing their work reach its potential; it will drive away its high-performance talent. In essence, they will poison the hive and seal the fate for the next phase, or downward spiral, of the enterprise.

Design Thinking has its limits, the core shortcoming being that it uses only one of the five senses and other ways of knowing as the primary mode of creation. Because Design Thinking came out of the design and engineering world, the solutions tend to be visual.

There’s an intriguing term known as Life hacking. According to Wikipedia, “Life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life … anything that solves an everyday problem in an inspired, ingenious manner. The term is primarily used by...

Suppose we told you that you could spend $185,000 and turn it into $25 million or more in a few years. You would accuse us of phishing, an investment scam, or dismiss the proposition as foolhardy. Yet, these are the types of returns we see from clients and those in the world who invest in breakthrough innovation at their companies.

More research is showing us the power of empathy, as it can be used as the tissue that connects and deepens relationships. With empathy, you walk in the other’s high heels or sneakers, feel their feelings, experience life from their perspective. Human brains are filled with mirror neurons, which not only react to our subjects of empathy, but also reproduce their emotions.

The two, too common scenarios noted above are not innovation. Real innovation is not a product line extension or an additional feature. Spare us. The world is already surfeited with such nonsense.

The highest and best value of business is to find new opportunities and plug into emerging trends, rather than make deeper sense of what already exists. These envisioning roles and departments should be renamed the Foresight department rather than Insight.