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
egos jostling for priority. You don’t want to offend anyone but you also want the right result. You need Tonglen. Continue reading ‘The right word can change the world’
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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.
Continue reading ‘Talk or Walk?’
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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?
Continue reading ‘Just How Innovative Are You? Take Our Quick Self-Test’
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Last week I visited MSR - The Israel Center for Medical Simulation –in the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, and met with Dr. Amitai Ziv who heads it. We talked about innovation and simulation and possibilities for cooperation, and following the meeting, Amitai referred me to a recent interview (published in the McKinsey Quarterly, March 2008) with Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, apparently one of the leading and innovative medical institutions in the US.
© iStockphoto.com/Steve Luker
The interview’s title was “Innovation in health care”, and indeed innovation was the central theme. Dr. Cosgrove mentioned three “seismic shifts” (his expression) in health care, on which Cleveland Clinic was taking the lead. What struck me about them was, more than anything, how these three trends, touted as the absolute cutting edge of novelty, were exactly what any grandmother with common sense would probably have recommended. Please judge for yourself:
Continue reading ‘Your grandmother, the innovator, and second-order innovation’
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