Willing to Innovate? Start with Improving on Culture!

It is neither the business models nor the products that are innovative, but rather the minds behind them. Hence, nurturing a culture where people are willing to generate and execute on creative ideas is an essential skill for every innovation leader.

Expert Marketing Tips for the Small Business Owner

Marketing a small business may seem to be a daunting, expensive task. But it doesn’t have to be so. These expert marketing tips specifically for small business owners offer proven strategies you can apply immediately to start reaching out to your customers.

2021-12-17T12:37:49-08:00January 4th, 2019|Categories: Strategies|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |

The Gig Economy and Workers’ Rights

The gig economy is no longer simply a phrase that individuals existing as professional outliers use to describe themselves. Instead, the gig economy describes a substantial, rapidly growing part of modern society. If you aren’t a part of it, the odds are you know someone who is.

5 Ways to Create a Culture That Embraces and Adapts to Change

As part of today’s changing technological landscape, it is vital to create a workplace culture that adapts to those changes. Doing so starts with having a comfortable workplace culture to begin with. Making your employees feel at ease in their current working conditions is the basis of creating a workplace that can adapt to changes.

Innovation Hot Spots – Countries vs. Cities

We increasingly see the world and much of its innovation through the lens of cities not countries, but there is little clarity around where the true innovation hotspots of today, let alone tomorrow, are to be found. While there is general agreement around which are the most innovative countries, the lack of consensus around the criteria used to identify an innovative city has produced multiple views and varied answers. If we want to understand more about the approaches that are the most effective in leading locations, we must decide on the best way to assess which cities are the most innovative.

The Untold Story Behind Switzerland’s Success with James Breiding

Switzerland – a tiny country with few natural advantages – has become incredibly successful in the world of banking, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and more. James Breiding, author of the bestselling book, Swiss Made, explores the enabling factors for innovation in Switzerland. He makes the point that when an entrepreneur comes up with a new and innovative method or product, there will be resistance from those who have accepted the status quo. Entrepreneurs as well as intrapreneurs need to have thick skin if they wish to disrupt the market.

Who Are the Great Innovators Among Us?

Humans are innately concerned with what makes up the creative inventors among us. We want to know how to cultivate our inner innovator and nurture those qualities that will serve us both as individuals and as employees.

5 Emerging Trends in the Financial Sector

The financial landscape is changing and the crowd is uniquely suited to help banks and other financial institutions solve some of the challenges they face. In this article, we look at five tech trends and how they’re changing how financial institutions interact with their customers.

Why Crowdsourcing is Critical to the Future of Education

Educational institutions have the reputation of being slow-moving behemoths, but this label is undeserved. According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the educational sector worldwide is more innovative than it gets credit for.

Rethinking The Way We Generate Insights

Identifying new sources of growth has become increasingly more complex given the myriad of alternatives that new business models, strategic partnerships, advanced technologies, and other disruptive mechanisms offer us. Taking a systematic approach to finding these opportunities means veering from our usual mode of operations to a much more speculative mindset where the learning journey is as important as the destination itself.

Risk, Great Ideas, and Your Business Model

Where do great ideas come from? Obviously they come from many sources, which means that your systematic innovation process has to support and sustain multiple efforts at ideation in parallel. In the following article we will explore some promising ways that you may be able to find ideas that will take your own business forward.

An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself

Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers. Using external resources can often avoid pitfalls and align the portal success rate to corporate expectations, objectives and ambitions. Here six questions are asked that can help you take the decision whether to launch a managed portal internally or externally.

Learning From Innovation Hubs: Fluidity, Serendipity, and Community Combined

Innovation hubs are popping up from Addis to Amsterdam and Boston to Bangalore. Fuelled by ideals of openness, community and collaboration, hubs aim to be the next orgware for innovation—beyond business incubators and R&D labs. Managers, policymakers and investors have taken note, but are grappling with how to engage. What makes hubs so appealing and can they teach innovation managers anything new?

Community Innovation is Led by Positive Deviants

Positive Deviance (PD) is an idea which is based on the observed principle that in any community there are people who adopt unusual and successful approaches to problems that beset the whole community. These people are the ‘positive deviants.’