Overview: Innovation Strategy

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…

Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…

"Performance reviews that are tied to compensation create a blame-oriented culture. It’s well known that they reinforce hierarchy, undermine collegiality, work against cooperative problem solving, discourage straight talk, and too easily become politicized. They’re self-defeating and demoralizing for all concerned. Even high performers suffer, bec…

"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…

Innovation loves diversity. Europe's diverse. Why isn't Europe innovative? "teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do. When a diverse range of experts interact... the solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innova…

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

The focus here is on business, but why not government? "By using communities, businesses can look beyond their four walls to access a global talent pool ... Communities allow businesses to accelerate and scale innovation by widening the funnel of what they can evaluate, by filling in missing skills and talent, and flattening the distance between …

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

"If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pu…

Apart from the obvious platitudes ... "If Open Innovation is not seen as a long term capability building exercise then it will fail.... The NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a big barrier and should never be underestimated." ... there's some interesting case studies in here - e.g.,: through "TechnoWeb, our internal social media tool, we …

The forward of this book, by Brian Solis, made me want to substitute 'citizen' for 'consumer' and 'customer', and 'government' for 'business': "The future of customer engagement requires a more thoughtful and localized approach. Connected customers aren’t complacent, fickle or unfaithful, they’re focused on what’s important to them. As they’re al…

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

"‘social desking’, where personal workspaces are geared to co-work as well as solitary work. This involves rethinking the office as a shared space, that should be organized around something other than optimizing square meters per employees. Ultimately, it has to be judged by productivity and worker engagement. And the tricky part is not space, but…

"Innovation is challenging because to innovate we must seek out uncertainty. For most people, this isn't comfortable - that's why we don't like "this might not work." Nevertheless, if we want to do work that makes a difference, that's where we need to be. To grow we have to try, stumble, and learn."

"Innovation is the process of idea management - so, yes, you need great ideas to innovate, but that is only part of it. You also need to be able to select ideas. Once you've done that, you need the ability to execute them. While all this is going on, you have to keep people inside your organization enthusiastic about the ideas. And at the end …

Great article on Medium. Best part comes at the end: "This week we launched an initiative that aims to ease the conflict between these opposing forces. Each of our team members gets to study a subject of their choice over the period of a year. It's a long term study initiative that resembles a PhD. Think of it more like a thesis than project wo…

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!

"the process we use here at Fractl to come up with ideas that we feel confident will find viral success. "

"Since ancient times people have held the notion that there's something mysterious, unpredictable, and even divine about where good ideas come from. But according to David Burkus, assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, today researchers are studying the heck out of creativity and much of what we think we know about the topic…

I used to refer to great-websites-for-the-wrong-audience as Meatball Sundaes, but this visual metaphor is much better... using Sharepoint to deliver social intranets for organisations that don’t want social intranets, due to the passionate conviction that they need a social intranet.

Two posts addressing innovation in large organisations in my stream this morning:Innovations from the edgeRisk and reward: Joi Ito on what news orgs could learn from tech companies about innovationThe director of the MIT Media Lab compares the worlds of media and tech, and says “When you’re sinking, you have two ways to go: You can bet the house o…

Worth a read, food for thought: "But while we love reading up on how these leaders turned the tide in their industry or organization, recent research suggests that most creative people aren't given the opportunity to lead. We love stories of creative people; we just don't want to be led by them."

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