The session’s going well. Comfortably seated on leather seats, your team has efficiently dissected the product, juggled concepts, whisked the financials up and down in a cocktail shaker and set fire to the business plan. You’re off to a good start. As their leader, you summarize the teams’ exciting new ideas. One colleague suggests amusing puns, another submits a carefully handwritten list. This could get tricky. There’s potential for disagreement in the ranks, with lots of sensitive
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Do you sometimes feel your Marketing and R&D are from different planets? Talking different languages? Is there a way to create a common language that can improve our interactions?
If the situation in this clip is familiar, you may want to read on.
The high tech sector has an impressive track record with regards to workplace innovation and efficiency. With theemergence of popular programs such as skype and google video chat, telecommuting has become an accepted reality in the modern day workplace. Employees can now work from anywhere in the world and still have that crucial face-to-face time needed.
This solution seems quite elegant, but the reality is that even with a video substitute there are still a few vital characteristics missing. The telecommuter using video chat software is confined to the computer of the person he is talking to and is not able to be part of the office culture.
The ingenious folks over at Willow Garage (a company that develops open source software for robot applications) have taken telecommuting one step further with the introduction of the telepresence robot. This “robot” allows telecommuters to move around the office, be part of meetings or presentations, and totally freak out the new guy. Check out the video below to see the telepresence robots in action at Mozilla headquarters!
Seeing candidates waiting in the SIT reception area to be interviewed for a facilitation and account management position brought back memories of my very first impressions of the place. So if insights about innovation & the SIT methodology are more your thing, this might not be the post for you…
During the long recruiting process and gazillion interviews I went through way back then, I spent quite some time in the SIT reception area. Having recently left a corporate career at that time, I came to the interview wearing what I thought was an appropriate interview outfit: buttoned up shirt, dress pants and high-heeled stiletto-like sandals. The first indication that I may have gotten it wrong happened as I was riding the elevator up to the SIT offices and was asked: “are you going to see the weirdoes on the third floor?”
Pretty quickly I understood what it meant. The first thing I noticed going in was the shoes or in most cases, the lack thereof. Most of the people in the office were walking around barefoot. This was accompanied, what else, by short cargo pants and plain T-shirts. As I was digesting what I was seeing, examining my own outfit all over again and feeling oh so inadequate, I thought I spotted a woman with shoes on. As she approached, I looked more carefully and realized the one real pair of shoes I managed to spot, except for flip-flops and comfort footwear, was of a bright yellow color.
In our previous post we wrote about how talking about innovation is not enough: you also have to act on it. In this post we will give you our insights on how to translate the innovation and creativity talk into real action.
If you are the kind of leader with the insight that innovation is important, and you also do not accept that relying on chance or unpredictable events are valid leadership qualities; if you are the proactive, hard worker who wants to create innovation, what can you do?
Here’s a suggestion for a good start:
* Acquire knowledge – Learn about how you can implement effective innovation through systematic and focused efforts. There are many good training programs and tons of literature for this. Start with a simple test, by asking your associates how they define innovation. If you can agree on this, you have a base to build on. Then move on to gaining more knowledge about principles and models for systematic innovation.
Members of Amdocs senior leadership got together for an innovation camp that began with an impossible mission - to create the Creativity and Innovation Center in Sderot, in the south of Israel, all within less than 20 hours!
The center in Sderot is now part of the “Tachlit Center“, which serves over 70 youth at risk that have dropped out of conventional educational establishments, and through this work exerts positive influence on the entire community in various ways.
SIT was the prime facilitator for this innovation camp.
As specialists in creative processes and innovation, we have worked with many companies over the last ten years, giving us many years of real experience in creating innovations and actually implementing them on the market. And, after talking to thousands of managers, the situation is clear to us:
Most everyone strongly feels a need to continuously renew their commercial offering and working methods to keep competitive in the market. They follow the modern mantra of ‘differentiate and create value’ and to achieve this, everyone wants to be more innovative.
Indeed they all like to talk the creativity and innovation talk. Most managers agree that innovation is the last stronghold for competing in a global economy. Moreover, they are interested and fascinated by the thought of working systematically with innovation in order to gain a breakthrough to create growth and profitability for their organizations.
We all agree about all this… intellectually. But very few translate this talk into action.
A. How much time each month do you dedicate to innovation? 1. About 5 minutes
2. 1-3 hours
3. 5-10 hours
4. Should I also include sleeping and weekend time?
B. How many innovation books have you read over the last year?
1. They write books on this stuff?
2. 1-3
3. 2-6
4. I lose count
C. How many Innovation companies are you familiar with?
1. Ooh, an innovation company! What’s that?
2. 1
3. 5
4. All of them
D. How many innovation conferences did you attend over the last 2 years?
1. I’m sure I’ll visit one some time soon…
2. 1
3. 2
4. Attend… or speak at?
