Obviously COVID-19 is having an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, with the scope and scale of business disruption being immense and incredibly challenging. But disruption is what innovation people are generally excellent at responding to, so the question becomes - “how do you and your team support your organisations within this environment?”
There are four ways to crowdsource answers to your innovation challenges: garden variety crowdsourcing, distant expert sourcing, expert targeting, and force multiplying.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a category of cloud computing designed to protect applications and data against natural and human disasters. It ensures that service disruption of a business is kept to a minimum by enabling a full recovery through the cloud. Most often it is handled by a third-party provider and managed by your internal IT personnel, removing some workload from your IT professionals and giving them peace of mind.
Someone once told me this: “Innovation is like an apparition of the Virgin Mary: one person saw her, but everyone talks about it.” Although funny, the quote aptly captures an attitude towards innovation that exists in many companies today. Innovation – and the skills that enable it – are sometimes considered as mystical gifts, preserved for the chosen few. In other cases, innovation is feared, because it involves unregulated processes, risk taking and investments with unpredictable outcomes. In this blog post, I’d like to make a case against this kind of innovation paralysis. Every company must innovate, and with the right understanding of the word ‘innovation’, every company can.
Given the relatively small number of qualified solution providers for any given technical challenge, one fairly productive and successful problem solving approach undertaken by corporate technology seekers is to organize "supplier summits."
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.
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Innovation and organizational learning are inextricably connected. A company must learn from its mistakes and cultivate multiple pathways for recognizing and leveraging the best ideas effectively, whether those ideas come from inside or outside of the organization, says Jim Clemmer. Here are 35 ways to sharpen your organizational "innovation radar," to accelerate learning cycles and recognize and capitalize on opportunities faster.
Most ideation activities result in the generation of a number of ideas. However, in most cases, only one idea – or a collection of ideas combined into one bigger idea – will actually be implemented. This does not mean that any one of the solutions is actually the right solution. Only that one solution is chosen. Unfortunately, the designers of many an innovation initiative fail to consider this simple fact. As a result, the chosen idea is often not in the best interest of the individual or the organisation running the initiative. Worse, in many cases no idea is ever implemented.
Kahn Academy is in the process of disrupting the long-staid textbook publishers market and K-12 education. This school is a stellar example of how any business today can thrive by capitalizing on trends that are opening markets for non-traditional competitors.
Good ideas are most successful when they're not just a modern novelty, but fulfill an unmet customer need. Gis van Wulfen describes how to find innovation opportunities by identifying customer frictions.
Diversity is the key to creativity. Not just diversity in your workforce, but in your personal life, the teams you form and the managers whom you hire and promote, explains Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Brainstorming can be effective if it is performed properly. In this article, Jeffrey Baumgartner explores some of the weaknesses of traditional brainstorming and explores several potentially fruitful alternatives.
Stephen Shapiro explains the thinking behind open creativity and why he wrote a book and created a card deck called Personality Poker.
In a world filled with accelerating, unprecedented change, the ability to navigate the unknown and explore new areas is becoming an essential skill, says Michelle James.
