The digital age creates a wide range of new opportunities for innovation. Examples include new marketing outlets through social media; ‘big data’ information on customers and the market; mobile devices that connect companies to customers 24/7; and apps that redefine business models. However, not all C-suite executives have a digital mindset. As a result, innovation […]
Read More… from CIOs: Coach and Communicate with C-suite for Digital Innovation
Google was famous for its 20% free innovation time policy. Google employees were allowed to spend 20% of their time in the office to pursue any personal interests and ideas that could lead to new products or revenue sources for Google. Aside from this mandate, employees were unfettered by deadlines and goals. Instead, they were […]
Read More… from Why Slack Time Is Important for Innovation: It’s Not What You Think
Is sarcasm in the workplace as destructive as usually assumed? While sarcasm — in which people express one thing by saying the exact opposite — is rampant in organizations, most leadership and communication books urge people to avoid sarcastic remarks, which are considered a negative form of communication. However, a team of researchers argue that […]
Two schools of thought exist on the best source of innovation. The foundational school argues that a deep, expert knowledge of the domain is required to unlock new pathways. Only someone with a complete immersion in the topic is going to discover the breakthrough innovation in that topic. The tension school argues that a diversity […]
Read More… from Broad Knowledge or Narrow Expertise: What Works Best for Innovation?
Innovation is central to a firm’s survival. In a world of demanding customers, myriad choices, and constant change, a company must build its competitive advantage on its ability to innovate. However, while espousing the importance of innovation to their employees and managers, companies are finding that they are failing to create a passion for innovation […]
Read More… from Three Sets of Values that Can Inspire a Culture for Innovation
Learning from errors is central to human development. Learning in a business context occurs best when there is a mind-set of acceptance of human error, and furthermore the experimental trials that lead to successful innovation, new processes and better performance necessarily entail errors on the way. Due to the potential costs and negative, sometimes disastrous, […]
Read More… from Better Error Management Can Foster Innovation and Learning
The traditional wisdom declares that companies that have their sights on export markets must first become innovators in their domestic markets. Innovation will give them the competitive advantage required to succeed in export markets. Another theory, however, argues for a relationship in the other direction. In other words, in addition to innovation leading to exporting, […]
Read More… from Innovation is Key to Exporting Success for SMEs
How successful are your innovation efforts? For many companies, proof of groundbreaking innovation comes in the form of patents. The question about research productivity is often answered by how many inventions have emerged from a company’s R&D capabilities, as measured by the number of patents filed. Quantity, however, does not necessarily mean quality. The true […]
Read More… from How Companies Are Trading Innovation Quality for Quantity
In the early 1990s, large corporations started moving, slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, away from the kind of broad scientific research that led to such inventions as Nylon and the graphic user interface (GUI). GUI transformed personal computing by enabling users to, for example, simply drag a document into a folder instead of typing […]
Read More… from Will Corporations Leaving Basic Scientific Research Kill the Golden Goose?
Entrepreneurs innovating in the technology space often lack the know-how or “specialized complementary assets” within their companies to successfully commercialize their innovations. Consequently, to date, the academic literature on this subject has advised them to contract with or license the commercialization to incumbent companies that already have an established market presence. In the short term […]
Read More… from Should Technology Innovators Participate in the Commercialization Process?
