An innovation culture is an organisation’s ability to make change something people want to embrace rather than endure. It creates the human, structural and decision-making conditions needed to explore, experiment and turn ideas into genuine competitive advantage before the market forces change upon the business.
There is a season for corporate innovation. Somewhere between the end of one financial year and the beginning of serious planning for the next, organisations book a venue outside the city and hold an innovation day. They are organised almost…
I import American everyday carry products and it is exactly the kind of boring business YouTubers keep discovering. I also have a second e-commerce selling decks and innovation tools and chair a heritage railway preservation association. All three take the…
For years the equation looked simple. Be an expert, accumulate experience, aim for excellence, and everything would work out. The trio of expertise, experience and excellence was your immunity charm against unemployment, obsolescence and awkward questions. Being the best in…
Company manifesto examples are easier to admire than to learn from, because most collections reprint the text and stop there. What follows is a curated set with what each one is doing, why it works, and a link to read…
Innovation killers are the people who close an idea down before it has been understood. Every organisation has them, most leaders can name theirs within about four seconds, and almost nobody has a strategy for them beyond hoping they miss…
Business reinvention behaves like innovation. It runs as an uninterrupted path of discovery and an endless creative process built into the culture, rather than arriving as an event with a start date and a launch party. The question worth asking…
The Braintrust is a practice developed at Pixar. A group of experienced people meet on request to discuss, critique and advise on projects still under development inside the company, and the whole point is to help creative teams improve their…
Being innovative is no longer enough. You have to be disruptive. But disruptive in which sense exactly? Does it mean showing you are a rebel taking on an established business on its own ground? Does it mean being visionary enough…
Can innovations be classified at all, and are there genuinely several types of them? The question sounds academic and it is the difference between a team that knows what it is doing and a team chasing whatever is fashionable this…
Innovation expert. How can anybody claim to be one when nobody can agree on what an innovation actually is? The word tires a lot of people out, and for good reason. Everything has become innovation, and the term empties itself…
I have expressed doubts before about putting the words expert and innovation next to each other. So the fair question is whether anybody can become an innovation expert at all, and whether it is a matter of personality, training or…
Radical innovation, disruptive innovation, disruption. Business owners enjoy discussing these, usually while supplying their own definition in place of having understood what is at stake. I reach for the word disruption about as willingly as I would put my tongue…