Unleashing Corporate Innovation: Identifying the Constraints
Corporate innovation struggles, and not from a lack of ideas or capital. More often, the constraints are time and attention.
Thinking Big with the Internet of Things
I was sent a link to this video from a friend at Gartner, after our conversations last month at Symposium. It's a great topic - the Internet of Things on Formula 1 race cars - sexy stuff, and van Manen's statistics really boggle the mind. Check it out - there are a number of specific things to listen for ... [ted id=1802] Just a few thoughts ... The idea of continuous improvement is heavily baked in to the motor racing…
A Nice Knock-Down Argument
Sales and the Gantt "Why exactly does he want to meet again?" I could sense the exasperation in Karl's voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn't about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would have found a convenient excuse to skip the invite. "I just don't understand why we need this meeting ... the projects are moving forward, we…
Design Thinking and Process – Is It In You? (1 of 2)
Continuing a bit on my recent Design meme; I talk about the current relevance of design thinking, and the impact it can have on change management - but if it feels a bit foreign, how can you tell if you have it in you? Do You Think Visually? Interesting how Design always seems to have a strong visual component, even though functional design (like my data warehouse or the structure of my house) is not directly visible. Still, I thought…
A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)
Spoiler alert: It can't be taught ... One of the questions I get - and I'm getting this a lot lately - is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about learning to use Excel, Access, and whatever native query / data download tools are available - to pull some data from the system, just to…
Leading Innovation: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution
Four required competencies for leading innovation - defined, and put in context with examples.
A Company is like a Sphere
Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit - I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring. A company is like a sphere. As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles. As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a…
Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities
I'm exchanging email with someone interested in establishing a skunk works, and they are asking some very interesting questions about the nature of innovation and the ingredients for an "environment of possibilities" ... The Current Environment ... things are ... [as they are] because someone already tried unsuccessful alternatives ... [This] begs the question: when it is required, how can rapid innovation be achieved? Rapid innovation comes when the environment allows it and the skill sets enable it. An "environment…