Are you thinking about ways to transform your workplace into an environment more conducive to innovation? This article takes a closer look at six components of creative climates that have shown to be significant at facilitating creativity according to new research.
Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?
Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.
Innovation is frequently marketed as driver of growth and prerequisite for remaining competitive. However, the process is often risky, especially for small or medium sized enterprises in search of ways to successfully manage their new products, services or businesses in a systemic and stable manner. Luckily, tools such as the “A.T. Kearney House of Innovation” are available to lend an essential helping hand.
What makes a company innovative? Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. It should not simply be a slogan, nor an end unto itself, argues Jeffrey Baumgartner. To be truly innovative, an organization should have seven essential characteristics.
Being an effective innovator is not an easy task. The good news is that you can learn from others’ experiences. Gijs van Wulfen walks us through some of the important lessons he learned as a marketer, strategy consultant and innovation facilitator.
Switzerland is more innovative and entrepreneurial than generally thought. The world holds on to the caricature of Heidi and of utterly dull bankers, evoked by Helmut Schmidt, many years ago: “Europe is not governed by the gnomes of Zurich”. We forget the implications of the fact that the Swiss national hero is the ultimate rebel: Wilhelm Tell; and rebellion is companion of innovation.The strong Swiss franc and the weak state of the economies of its trading partners will make 2012 difficult, but Switzerland scores tangible successes: prosperity, low debt, reasonable growth, public budgets in the black, low unemployement and trade surplus. This miniature model of Europe must be an inspiration for the EU to become what it should be: the world’s most successful region in the 21rst century.
Entrepreneurial former Stanford students Kit Rodgers, Steve Garrity and Divya Nag discuss whether entrepreneurship can be taught or learned, and whether entrepreneurial skills come from innate qualities within an individual. Concepts explored include exposure to conducive environments, being entrepreneurially-minded as a member of a team, and the importance of pattern recognition.
The problem most startups have when they take their product or service to the big companies? “The big companies can’t figure out how to make it mundane enough to interoperate with all of the complexity they have,” answers Liz Tinkham, a global manager at Accenture. She says that a start-up may have the best piece of new technology ever, but if it doesn’t work easily with other technology, it’s just too hard to get larger companies to adopt the service or product.
The mission of this project is to support the EU Commission and the EU in general to help small & medium businesses, innovative entrepreneurs and the public sector to understand, adopt and leverage Social Media with the intention to more successfully grow their respective businesses, create additional jobs and better integrate government and population.
Often individuals and organizations tend to get stuck in the mode of talking about innovation and/or trying to understand innovation. The only way to really know innovation is to do innovation, and learn from your mistakes along the way. In this article Harun Asad suggests preparing an Innovation Mission Statement as an initial, action-oriented way to get out of the rhetoric trap.
A company seeking to adopt mass customization must first understand what the idiosyncratic needs of its customers are. After this crucial step, the company may establish what it is going to offer and what it is not. In part three in this series on mass customization, Frank Piller and Fabrizio Salvador walk through some of the potential methods of solution space development.
Former U.S. Undersecretary for Energy Dr. Kristina Johnson articulates the advantages of various sectors to make impact on critical issues and to drive innovation. Interviewer Dr. Tina Seelig also provides background on the Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, that seeks to bring entrepreneurship and innovation skills into undergraduate engineering education.
Serial entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman encourages individuals to become the entrepreneurs of their own lives. Hoffman shares the importance of taking intelligent risks, building thoughtful networks and continually adapting your skills to navigate a fulfilling career path.
Clientelism, Wintelism and innovation eco-systems: moments of truth within the global semiconductor industry. Europe and Japan tried for years to challenge Intel by building national seminconductor champions, yet wihout success. Today, a small British company named ARM has qua its eco-system strategy managed to launch a more serious go at Intel.
