Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

To take a coarse idea and refine it and evolve it into a successful innovation is extremely challenging. It is not enough to believe in yourself and feel strongly about the potential of the end result. You have to have support. Last week Susanna got a smack in her head that made her realize some essentials about innovation.

Are you in a “more of the same mode” in your innovation work? In this article Susanna Bill uses two real-life examples to remind us of the need to see beyond given truths. We need to keep our eyes and ears open for the triggers presented by others. She also returns to a “golden-oldie” exercise to put ourselves off balance and open up our thinking for new opportunities.

The switch from divergent to convergent thinking in innovation workshops is smooth in literature but extremely tough in reality. In this article Susanna Bill explains how she was on the verge of making a huge mistake until she learned about the middle component between divergence and convergence: the groan zone.

Many firms tend to mix the terms and concepts of creativity and innovation. There is a view that catering for creativity automatically makes innovation happen. In this post Susanna Bill compares the works from three different authors about the factors influencing a creative and innovative climate. What can be learned?

The power of motivation for innovation has been in focus for research for the last decades. In this post Susanna Bill shares a personal experience of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation to explain why communities of practice need to be managed carefully.

Fail fast. Fail cheap. Fail early. Go out to fail. We have all heard these words numerous times in connection to innovation and how to create radical innovation, the ultimate dream for all of us involved in the field. In fact the f-word is used so frequently in connection to innovation that it is about to become yet another meaningless slogan. Why is failure so hard? In this blog post Susanna Bill takes failure out of slogans and into a human orientated perspective.

Can an organization be too customer oriented? What are the consequences of letting short term requirements of existing customers cannibalize the exploration of your own an agenda? How can a sense of meaning be reinstalled in disillusioned development organizations? Read Susanna’s latest blog post to find out.

I have decided to take a small innovation psychology detour because I urge you to tap into an amazing innovation experience that I just had. After watching the documentary “el Bulli, Cooking in Progress” I realize that I was invited into a full innovation circle and I crave to share some of the great insights that two hours of watching offered me.

Browsing through these paragraphs will take you approximately two minutes. If you read them more carefully, four perhaps. Not a lot of time or investment. In this blog Susanna Bill reminds us why time is key for innovation and organizational change.

What do attending a business lunch or going to Catholic Mass have to do with groupthink? Susanna Bill discusses the notion of groupthink and how experiencing something for the first time helps you snap out of it.

All organizations face wicked problems – highly complex issues demanding multiple viewpoints to be solved. In this blog Susanna Bill argues why innovation needs to leave the single product dominant perspective behind and take social aspects into consideration.

Why is it so hard to open up to other perspectives when “thinking outside the box” is the one of the mantras of innovation? In this blog, Susanna Bill provides concrete advise for how to practice in order to make other perspectives less scary, using the experience of Cirque du Soleil as a mini case.

The level of innovation capability within organizations is connected to the ability of making the right sense of collective experiences, especially in uncertain or ambiguous times. In this post Susanna Bill delves deeper on the importance of sense making and the effects it has on the level of innovation capabilities. And addresses a personal dilemma.