According to legend, Henry Ford scoffed at market research and what we now call Consumer Insights, proclaiming, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” While there is a certain degree of wisdom in this statement, it has been misquoted to justify bad, hubris-inspired product failures by too many corporate egos.

Risk has a bad reputation, and for valid reasons. Nothing can negatively impact revenue, pollute a healthy customer base, or disappoint shareholders quite like it. This is why industries spend millions of dollars a year just to avoid risk.

One of the first misses in an employe ideation system is not tracking ideas in the first place. There are a few reasons that this is important. First, building the organizational skill to effectively manage employee ideas takes time. It’s rare that a program to become an overnight success. For that reason, leveraging a maturity model for idea management is a good way to understand progress. But you need...

Richard Haasnoot presents another in a series of articles about how you can consistently generate at least 12 X more ideas than brainstorming

We found 10 useful insights that lead to better ideas that impact the bottom line. Those insights are grouped into four main pillars for managing a successful ideation program

How compares Open Innovation with the Crowd with Participative Innovation? And what if, if Open Innovation, which was intended to seek out outside, were coming back inside?

Daniel Nolan shows how Challenge Mapping is a simple yet powerful tool to properly frame a question.

There are many reasons why people say ideas are worthless...Take two companies with a similar idea, Google and AltaVista, one is the multibillion dollar envy of the tech world, the other a broke, wound up company bought out by Yahoo. The difference?

The term “Fuzzy Front-End” (FFE) has been established for the early stage of innovation which determines the innovation effectiveness and hence ultimately innovation success. We wanted to better understand where leading firms are setting their priorities in the FFE currently and where they see things going in the future. To answer this, we conducted a study. Our train of thought and the main findings are in a two-part article series published here.

Many companies practice some form of brainstorming or ideation. While it can be freeing to withhold restraints such as costs, technical matters, and enter into the unchartered frontiers of What If, a lack of focus and too few creative restraints make it a fun, but fruitless experience.