Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

As I sit here working from home I am hearing a piece on the radio about new research that finds that when one exercises it prepares the mind to be more receptive and positions it in a “better state of equilibrium” for receiving information. Further, the research also found out that kids that have the hardest time focusing learn better after exercise and occasional mini exercise breaks during the school day. The resulting research was so positive that a school system in the state of North Carolina here in the USA, has adopted its recommendations and is already seeing some results. Of course we all sort of knew this at the margins. For example, I think best when I am walking and I write stories in my mind when I am riding my road bicycle. After these insights I started thinking of ways to be more active at work and one of the ideas was to have standing work stations. I do not particularly like sitting down all day in front of a computer, so I looked around, observed people and different ...

Consistent with the belief that it is our obligation to constantly reformulate how one looks at things via new perspectives and asking questions around the peripheries of what we do, I would like to propose a new way to visualize how we motivate people. If I look back at the things that I have done to get new Innovations adopted during my career, I find some recurring themes. One of them has to do with the evangelization process that one has to compel when a new Innovation is positioned inside an organization. In a somewhat circuitous route, I believe that the way to get people to want to support your ideas is by stimulating their “initiative” gene, if there is such a thing. So, how does one design an organization to provoke individual initiative? Here are a few conditions that are a must: 1) the organization has to be flexible enough to allow employees to deploy their initiative without fear of retribution, of stepping on other department’s toes, or fearing that they can loose their ...

So here is the thing…It seems as though with all this communications technology out there – please, let me count the ways: phone (talking), email, IM, Twitter, SMS, web email, Facebook, linkedIN, community portals, etc… people seem to be in touch less, at least as it concerns the digital immigrants. You know... us old folks...that is, anyone not born since Microsoft has been a life force. This frustrates the heck out of me because I have members of my communities that do not exercise their communication muscle via these new technologies. They are stuck on the old world and use that “talking” medium to the exclusion of everything else…”Oh, I don’t know how to text”, goes the old refrain…Well, LEARN…”Oh, I am just too tired to call at the end of the day” Well, send an SMS or email or twitter or IM, saying so! Please, here are a few insights on this subject in no particular order of importance; just top of mind thoughts: 1) Communication is not just about talking on the phone; it is also ...

Just the other day I was invited to speak locally at a competitive intelligence conference. These practitioner were very intrigued by the whole concept of innovation and the philosophical efforts therein to accelerate and harmonize the process of producing product and services that people actually want.( Let us remember that 80% of product launches are failures). In my view (and theirs) timely competitive intelligence should be an important part of the “innovation algorithm.” Sources of competitive information cover the gamut and range from web sites, to analyst reports, to primary research to web searches. There is one source, however, that is often overlooked and that is a company’s own internal activities. The larger the organization the more competitive intelligence that is available for analysis, mining, comparing, etc… The difficulty is in capturing and sharing this information. Therefore the easy and high level answer is to implement a knowledge management/sharing platform inte...

As I was doing a little work this weekend, I was listening to a talk show in NPR radio. The host was Diane Rehm and the subject was a book called The Survivors Club, authored by Ben Sherwood a researcher. (For those international colleagues that are not familiar with NPR, it stands for National Public Radio, a free service that is funded largely by individual contributors). The author set out to research why and how humans respond to survival situations and as it inevitably happens with new research, some very interesting information and ideas emerged from the book. One of them is the development of a test available at http://www.thesurvivorsclub.org that aims to predict our individual responses to survival situations. It turns out that there are specific patterned behavioral responses that all of us fall into. The majority of us (about 80% according to the author) fall into the freezing response, which, it turns out it’s not the most favorable to dealing with survival/emergency si...