Robyn Bolton shares an insightful article on the importance of developing psychological safety in innovation and how to foster it. “Why doesn’t anyone bring me ideas?” “Why doesn’t anyone ask questions during my meetings?” “How can I get people to challenge my ideas?” If you have asked any of these questions, you are not alone. I hear these questions from managers to C-suite executives in every industry imaginable because they know that sharing ideas, asking questions, and challenging others are…

Kaihan Krippendorff provides an article that offers a new twist on innovation development.  To keep up with today’s rapid pace of disruption, every company feels the pressure to innovate. Most of them, when trying to shift to an innovative culture, feel like they have to pursue brand new ideas. But when I was recently invited to judge an innovation competition for Macmillan Learning, I saw that there is another way. An innovation competition without any new ideas? This was the…

  How do you inspire creative thinking in your team without engaging the muse or adopting questionable practices? Stephen Wunker provides six practical steps that won’t break the law but will help break through constraints of the mind. How do I get my team to show creative thinking?” Under normal circumstances, many executives we work with routinely face this challenge. But with the pandemic transforming the way we do business, bold thinking has turned into a necessity. Several obstacles block…

  Amanda Setili explains how innovation is key to the evolution of an organisation, and how leaders can take action to speed the process. As much as leaders like to talk about innovation, a more accurate term for the process they wish to employ is evolution. Success in business comes from a lot of small actions and insights that accumulate and work to evolve the organization to a completely different state. In nature, an individual organism mutates and if it…

  Robyn M. Bolton makes a poignant observation on the popular approach to innovation and provides a few tips on how to punch out of the proverbial box.  The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results.” This quote, often (wrongly) attributed to Albert Einstein, is a perfect description of what has been occurring in corporate innovation for the last 20+ years. In 1997, The Innovator’s Dilemma, put fear in the hearts…

  Jared Simmons explains why simplifying assumptions could be the key to unlocking value faster and freeing up your knowledge workers to innovate. I learned the power of simplifying assumptions early in my career. As an engineering student, I watched my professors fill boards with Greek letters and symbols, exponents and integrals, constants and variables. Then, in the last 10 minutes of class we worked a real problem together. The first step of solving the real problem was always to…

  Recently, there has been much discussion about the value of play for helping creative ideas flourish, but Kaihan Krippendorff shares examples of play at work and provides 10 ways to inject play into your organization.  In the 1830s, an artist and tinkerer, Samuel Morse, directed his curiosity to a question few had considered before. Numerous scientists and inventors across the globe were working on the problem of how to communicate across long distances more quickly. At the time, information…

Amanda Setili shines a light on an initiative that sparked employee engagement, inspired innovation, and motivated collaboration.    What does a 110-year-old company do to increase the rate of innovation from less than one new business per year to 50?  The answer, says David Lee, Vice President of Innovation and New Ventures at UPS, is to launch a program that taps into the brilliant growth ideas lurking in the heads of many of its 480,000 employees.  The program is called…

To inspire successful innovation, Kaihan Krippendorff explains why the composition of the founding team is crucial and why the first step should be to find a sherpa. He provides six questions to help you assess and secure a powerful advocate to lead the team. That historic moment when the perfect team unifies beyond an opportunity, pregnant with possibility, is the essential scene of any great innovation legend: think Jobs and Wozniak when they created Apple, Gates and Allen with Microsoft,…

In this TEDX talk at Columbia University, Kaihan Krippendorff discusses employee innovation within the model of disruption, and how it helps activate lean, agile innovation and growth in your organization.    “Employees are the number one source of innovative growth options and the only remaining source of true competitive advantage. Arming them with the skills and tools necessary to innovate on a continual basis is of paramount importance to organizational survival.”   Points covered in the talk include: -The path…