Terms such as ‘volatility’ and ‘disruption’ are often used to describe a world in which competitive advantage is increasingly difficult to maintain. The extent of such volatility and disruption is quantified in a Boston Consulting Group study that examined the performance record, relative to their competitors, of 20,000 companies over a period of 40 years. […]
Subject: Creativity and Innovation
Choosing the best Corporate Venturing Projects
Corporate venturing, a collaboration between an established firm and an innovative start-up, has been gaining ground as a strategic path to innovation. There is a wide range of mechanisms for corporate venturing, of which the following is a sample: Scouting missions. Looking for innovations aligned with the company’s goals, representatives of the corporation meet with […]
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To Become a Creative Star, Collaborate with Stars
Past research has demonstrated the benefits of collaboration in creative endeavours. A new study drills down into the issue of collaboration and creativity by asking the question: does the quality of the collaborator make a difference? The results of the study are unequivocal: collaborator quality makes a difference in the outcome of creative innovation efforts. […]
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Spread Innovation Through Shared Leadership
Innovation can flourish in specific sections or units of an organization or system, but then fail to diffuse more widely. Two University of Warwick professors, Graeme Currie and Dimitrios Spyridonidis, studied the diffusion of 12 promising health care innovations from a citywide R&D unit to hospitals throughout the city. (The city is unnamed in the […]
Using Frugal Innovation to Serve Emerging Market Customers
To sell innovative products in emerging markets, companies from developed countries must take into account two fundamental facts about emerging markets. The first is that the growing middle class in emerging economies that represents the most valuable market for new products is price-sensitive — they do not earn what their middle-class counterparts in developed economies […]
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Transgenerational Entrepreneurship in Family Businesses
Launched in 2005, the STEP (Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices) Project is a global research initiative involving 35 universities in various regions of the world, including 10 in Europe, that studies entrepreneurship within business families. In 2017, the European STEP Council released the results of a survey of more than 350 successful transgenerational family businesses in […]
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Geography of Innovation: More Emerging Regions Involved, Advance Economies Still Dominate
Where does innovation come from? A new study of the ‘geography of innovation’ indicates that most innovation continues to be generated in the advanced economies of the world. However, emerging countries are starting to make their presence known. And multi-national enterprises (MNE’s) can play a major role in advancing innovation in regions throughout the world. […]
Integrating Social Identities Spurs Creativity and Innovation
Research has shown that creativity and innovation come from combining seemingly unrelated or irrelevant knowledge. You can create the context for combining unrelated knowledge by bringing together people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge. Thus, diversity (which might be based on race or gender but also on profession or function) is often sought in brainstorming teams. […]
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Why Flat Information Structures Enable Creative Thinking
Creativity occurs when pieces of information are put together in novel and useful ways. ‘Information’ here is used broadly, and includes objects, symbols and facts. This broad concept of information is known as ‘declarative information.’ For example, a chair consists of three pieces of declarative information: a seat, legs, and a back. Information can be […]
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Why Good Ideas Don’t See the Light of Day
Creativity is generating creative ideas. Innovation is successfully implementing creative ideas. Past researchers have connected creators to implementation by looking at such factors as network position: if creators have the right network, they have a greater chance of getting their ideas implemented. In his recent research, Stanford’s Justin Berg highlights another important factor in the […]