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What Is Idea Management?

Traditional innovation can only take your business so far, and without an evolution of processes, you might find it harder than ever to move new ideas forward. Introducing structures and systems to formulate, organize, and act upon new ideas is one of the best ways to optimize internal innovation. This practice is better known as idea management, and in this article we will define and discuss idea management in full.

The post What Is Idea Management? appeared first on InnovationManagement.

Zen vs. Zoom: Is Person-to-Person Interaction Better for Innovation?

The author draws upon the theory of “emptiness” and other principles of Zen Buddhism to evaluate the desirability of remote vs. person-to-person interaction during the course of innovation, especially new idea development. This evaluation is pursued within the context of three related idea process parameters: interdependence, intuition and intensity. An in-person work environment is recommended for the intense phases of new idea processing.

The post Zen vs. Zoom: Is Person-to-Person Interaction Better for Innovation? appeared first on InnovationManagement.

6 Innovation Exercises to Try With Your Team

Creative thinking and innovation don’t come naturally to everyone, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good at them. Sometimes, teams need practice and routine to improve their creativity skills. This article will highlight some popular innovation exercises you can conduct with your team to get your creative juices flowing. These will be a combination of workplace exercises and ice-breakers. Let’s get started.

The post 6 Innovation Exercises to Try With Your Team appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How Online Whiteboards Create Actionable Results for Businesses

To run a successful business, you must be able to complete individual and shared tasks regularly and reliably. One of the most significant components to achieving this is making sure you create actionable results in your meetings, conversations, and workflow.

The post How Online Whiteboards Create Actionable Results for Businesses appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How to Improve Return on Investment With a New Project Management Approach

Too often, leaders label projects as successes or failures based on budget and schedule expectations. Although time and cost are critical factors, they ignore whether the project delivered the expected benefits.

The post How to Improve Return on Investment With a New Project Management Approach appeared first on InnovationManagement.

The Inverted Funnel: How Blockchains Will Shake Up the Traditional Consumer Funnel

The use of blockchains will become mainstream in a few years from now, so say consultancies and pundits, who look at penetration curves across the globe1. Crypto is on the rise and powerhouses like Starbucks and Nike are merging blockchain into the fabric of business, reinventing the dialogue with their fans. In this short piece, [...]

The post The Inverted Funnel: How Blockchains Will Shake Up the Traditional Consumer Funnel appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How to Create a Competitive Advantage Through Innovation

In the modern world of business, innovation is both an equalizer and a differentiator. It can give tiny startups an edge over global conglomerates and enable industry leaders to develop competitive advantages.

The post How to Create a Competitive Advantage Through Innovation appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How to Innovate Your Business to Make It Climate Efficient

Climate efficiency is key for the future of everyone on this planet. With an issue of such magnitude, you may feel that individual actions cannot make a large impact. While your business by itself cannot solve global warming, the actions you take can inspire others and can have a much bigger impact than you may realize.

The post How to Innovate Your Business to Make It Climate Efficient appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How to Create Innovation Confidence During the Great Resignation

Do your employees feel confident at work right now? Or are you worried that the Great Resignation may impact your company? Take these steps to make sure that your focus on innovation is the reason employees stay, and not the reason they leave. 

The post How to Create Innovation Confidence During the Great Resignation appeared first on InnovationManagement.

How the Pandemic Created the Virtual Innovation Lab

COVID reshaped every department—including your innovation department. Find out how some organizations adapted to the remote work age by creating the virtual innovation lab, and how you can create your own by downloading this complimentary infographic.

The post How the Pandemic Created the Virtual Innovation Lab appeared first on InnovationManagement.

Kellogg Shares Spike After the Company Announces Its Game-Changing New Direction

7 Ways to Create Confidence, Power and Power Momentum

4 Ways to Improve Project Management to Waste Less Time and Make More Money

4 Ways to Adapt Your Business as Your Industry Evolves

What Can Leaders Do to Have More Innovative Teams?

Talent is one of the main drivers of innovation and its scarcity and high value makes it a frequent cause for concern for leaders from all over the world. And for good reason. Quality talent can make a business up to 800 times more productive.

But some of the biggest managerial challenges of senior leaders are finding the right talent and encouraging innovative behavior in employees. In fact, only 23% of managers and senior leaders believe they have good methods in place to acquire and retain the best talent.

So, how do you find the right people, retain them, and get them to drive more innovation? Putting together innovative teams and making sure that you have the best talent in the organization is not just an HR responsibility. From top executives to managers and leaders, they all have a part to play in the quest for talent that can help the organization drive more innovation.

To this end, we wrote this article for people in large organizations, whether they are innovation managers, leaders, or executives, who want to build talented teams that can actually drive more innovation.

We’ll go through some important points on the characteristics of innovative employees and provide some practical tips on how to get better talent and tap into the potential of current workforce to drive more innovation.

Turning Ideas into Innovations: An In-depth Guide

Every innovation starts with an idea. We all have ideas, even great ones, yet few people can bring them to life, and even fewer can turn them into innovations.

The topic of how to turn ideas into innovations has sparked many conversations and filled the internet and libraries with potential solutions. However, we realized that many online articles on this topic barely scratch the surface or don’t dig deep enough to explore the ins and outs of turning ideas into innovations.

The reason behind this is understandable. Bringing ideas to life is not easy and there is no silver bullet that can miraculously work for everyone everywhere. To add to the difficulty of implementation, ideas come in all shapes and forms, some more daring than others, which makes it even more difficult to come up with a practical roadmap.

However, as part of our mission to help customers turn more ideas into innovation, we want to give you the tools and information that can help you create your own roadmap for converting more ideas into reality.

We wrote extensively about innovation, ideation, and how to best manage ideas, but we haven’t covered this comprehensive topic in much detail. And to be honest, we can’t promise to provide all solutions and answers, but we are ambitious enough to try and provide as much value as possible, and hopefully inspire you to pursue your ideas and take them to completion. So, without further ado, let’s get to it!

The Leader’s Guide to Executing Innovation

Many would-be innovators obsess over ideas, wait for inspiration to strike, and believe that with the right idea, success can miraculously come overnight.

However, as we’ve written before, that’s just not going to happen. In fact, usually the only thing separating the winning innovators from the rest is execution. It makes all the difference in the world, and yet, it’s still a vastly underrated capability.

As part of our coaching program, we’ve asked hundreds of corporate innovators and innovation leaders to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. And, by far, the most common answer is that they’re great at coming up with ideas and thinking about the big picture but lack the patience and discipline to see things through to results.

As such, it’s safe to say that as a community, we innovators need to take a hard look in the mirror and admit that this an area where most of us have a lot of room for improvement.

So, in today’s article, we’ll explore the topic of executing innovation in more detail to try to understand what the problems associated with it are, and what successful execution of an innovation really takes. This is designed to be a guide to help leaders get it right, but I think there’s a lot that every innovator regardless of job title can learn from.

Cultural Differences and Innovation

The effects of cultural differences for innovation are an interesting and extremely multifaceted topic.

For most of us, it probably goes without saying that cross-cultural and multicultural capabilities are crucial in today’s globalized and hyperconnected world, and innovation is no exception. These capabilities are especially important if you’re working on it in a large international organization, as many of our customers are.

Such an organization must obviously think about how to adapt new innovative products and services to the cultures and unique characteristics of different markets and regions. But, in addition to that, they also need to manage the cultural differences within their organization while trying to innovate. Given that we have customers all over the world, it’s a theme we often get asked about.

And, of course, there’s also the age-old debate about the cultures of certain regions or countries being better suited to innovation to begin with.

So, in this today’s article, we’ll dive deeper on this nuanced topic and each of those three themes around cultural differences in innovation. We’ll also end by providing you with practical advice on how to look at and take these into account in your innovation work.

Accessing Tacit Knowledge to Drive More Innovation

The value of intangible assets in organizations is nowadays five times greater than the one of tangible assets. In fact, 84% of value in S&P companies is currently represented by intangible assets, like intellectual property, knowledge, or brand recognition, compared to merely 16% for tangible ones.

Even so, some leaders still have difficulties in grasping the power of knowledge and how it can be leveraged and managed to drive more innovation in their organizations. One of the biggest challenges for these leaders is that the majority of knowledge that makes more innovation happen is tacit, and therefore it’s harder to tap into its full potential through the traditional methods: processes, procedures and policies available in databases and documents.

Unfortunately, companies that were not able to keep up with these changes in value distribution faced difficulties and were surpassed by those that leveraged tacit knowledge better. Now, the question that arises is how top companies tap into the full potential of tacit knowledge.

So, in today’s article we’ll explain how different types of knowledge trigger innovation, what is the true value of tacit knowledge, as well as some practical tips on how to make the most of tacit knowledge.

How to Organize Innovation

I recently read a couple of excellent articles by Nick Skillicorn, and Prof. Rita McGrath where both discuss the challenges and intricacies involved in structuring and governing innovation within a large organization.

This is a classic topic that every corporate innovator has without a doubt come across, and it’s also one where “the right approach” is often quite elusive.

Inspired by those articles, we’ll present the most common archetypes and then dig a little deeper on the topic and share our thoughts and experiences to help you figure out how innovation should be structured within your organization.

How to Develop a Continuous Improvement Plan?

Organizations need to continuously improve if they want to stay in the game, maintain their competitive advantage and achieve long-term success. Even though most of us are aware of how important it is to strive to get better, both at an individual and at an organizational level, we often fail to make continuous improvement a regular practice.

Continuous improvement is common sense for most of us. It is something the majority strives to achieve whether it’s for personal or for professional development. We want to get better, to improve because it gives us meaning, makes us feel better and it’s rewarding.

But just like New Year’s resolutions, after the excitement of starting a new project, things slowly die down. We lose interest, we get back to old habits, and stop improving, until a new project emerges, and the pattern reoccurs.

Sustaining continuous improvement, as straightforward as it seems, is also difficult. So, in today’s article we’ll explain how to create a continuous improvement plan or program, stick to it, and make it a recurrent practice in your organization.

5 Best Practices for Planning an Internal Ideation Process

We’ve all been at some point in one of those meetings where we’re asked to come up with out of the box ideas for new campaigns, products, or solutions to various issues. Sometimes we might feel under pressure, but even so, the approach can bring results, especially in smaller organizations.

However, these are usually quick fixes, and when it comes to staying ahead of the curve and be innovative, you need more than a brainstorming session.

While there’s nothing wrong with these methods, on the long term you can’t expect great results from ideation if you don’t have a plan to turn ideas into tangible innovations.

A well-planned process for generating, managing, and implementing ideas gives new opportunities that otherwise might have been missed. For this reason, in today’s article we'll be focusing on some of the challenges and best practices in planning an internal ideation process that will enable larger organizations to raise their game.

Getting organizations to the Innovation Mode with George Krasadakis

We continue our series of interviews of leading global innovation experts with a discussion together with George Krasadakis, a 20-year innovation veteran and the author of The Innovation Mode book.

In this interview, George shares his thoughts on some of the challenges large organizations typically have with their innovation work, and also provides pragmatic, practical tips on how to start moving towards a mode where the organization can make innovation happen at scale.

How to Collect Ideas From Frontline Employees

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for the past two years, frontline employees have made headlines in all media outlets. While often left out of important conversations, their essential role in society, and therefore in organizations, has now been acknowledged and discussed more widely.

The value of frontline workers, their input, and ideas are indisputable. However, it’s still open for debate in organizations across the globe, how to best harness their tacit knowledge, know-how, and creativity.

In this article we’ll provide some practical suggestions on how to go about this. From how to collect ideas systematically, to engaging your employees in ideation, these tips can help you spot new opportunities to innovate.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it.