|
How To Break Down
Barriers To Communication
Within larger organizations one of
the biggest obstacles to
innovation is poor
internal
communication. A silo mentality develops so that departments
guard information and ideas rather than share them. People work
hard but in isolated groups...
More
Inspirational Business Plan: Successful Innovation
Brief History:
"The great accomplishments
of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas and
enthusiasm."
Thomas J. Watson...
More
Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements
Corporate
Capabilities (Water):
Why Idea Management?
All businesses are created first by ideas. Then
once you're in business you need ideas for
design, engineering,
manufacturing, marketing, advertising,
creative problem solving,
customer retention, etc.
The difference between success or failure in business could be just one
idea.
Idea management systems and process can help your company
make innovation a discipline. They can help
make the hunt for new possibilities each and every department's business, as
well as involve broader and more enthusiastic participation among managers
and employees.
Disciplined and well managed creativity breeds successful idea
generation. Corporations have limited resources, funds, and time to give
creative dreamers free reign to magically produce new ideas, however. "Most
companies are not short on new ideas, but they are short on ways to assess,
screen, prioritize, and execute those new ideas."6
10 Brainstorming Rules
-
Set directions.
Describe the situation and define the problem. Help people to understand
the problem to be solved and clarify the objectives.
Focus on
productive objectives and keep group on track...
More
29 Obstacles To Innovation
10 Ways To Murder Creativity
Joke
Managing New
Ideas
Company Director to Board Chairman: If any new
ideas come up while I am out of the meeting for a brief phone call, my vote
is 'No.'
The Jazz of Innovation
The improvisation-driven model for
innovation
project management doesnt discard structure, just as there is a clear
structure to good jazz. In innovation, this structure is created through
roadmaps, guiding principles,
business processes, systems and organizational
charts.
Strategic-planning
and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative
insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes
occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis
for improvisation,
experimentations,
discoveries and
innovation...
More
Innovation Process: Diversion
and Conversion of Ideas
"The process of innovation is a rhythm of search and selection,
exploration and synthesis, cycles of divergent thinking followed by convergence."9
Divergence, or creative synthesis, is the interlocking of
previously unrelated skills, or matrices of thought. The creation of such
intellectual ferment is important to innovation - the more options offered, the
more likely that an
out-of-the-box perspective will be available for selection.
Just hearing a very different perspective challenges the mindset of others
sufficiently that they will search beyond what initially appears to be an
obvious solution. This is a reason that intellectually heterogeneous
cross-functional teams are more innovative than homogenous functional ones.
As soon as a sufficient choice of innovative ideas has been
generated, a solution
convergence upon acceptable action
needs to be defined
and agreed upon. In addition to explicit knowledge, three types of tacit knowledge
overlapping specific, collective,
and guiding - need also to be taken into consideration and managed.

Humorous
Business Plan: How To Succeed In Innovation
Targeted Market:
"An idea
that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
Oscar Wilde...
More
The Seven Dimensions of Strategic
Innovation
The Strategic Innovation framework weaves together seven dimensions to
produce a range of outcomes that drive growth.
A company's
Organizational Readiness may drive or
inhibit its ability to act upon and
implement new
ideas and
strategies,
and to successfully manage operational, political,
cultural and financial demands that will follow...
More
Flat Organizational
Structure
Case Study
GE
"Discover where the best ideas are, and
implement them," is one of the
Jack Welch's trademark messages to managers. Creating, nourishing and
building a
learning culture
at GE is, in his view, the best way to eradicate one of the least attractive
features of the old GE the "not invented here" syndrome. Any idea, if it's
good one, says Welch, is worth pursuing and adopting no matter where it comes from inside GE, or at Wall Mart, Motorola, Mitsubishi, wherever.
Welch has a neat phrase for adopting an idea. He calls is "legitimate
plagiarism."12
It is Welch's ability to get others excited
about those good ideas explains his phenomenal results. He is an excellent
communicator. Of all his management secrets, his extraordinary
ability to communicate, to engender an enthusiasm in employees, may well
be his greatest. He knows that it is not enough to simply raise an idea with
employees. You have to keep repeating an idea until it finally sinks with
every employee at the company. Communicate, then communicate it again!
With Work-Out
as part of its DNA,
General Electric (GE) has become one of the most
innovative, profitable, and admired companies on earth. At its core, Work-Out is a very simple concept based on the
premise that those closest to the work know it best. When the ideas of those
people, irrespective of their functions and job titles, are solicited and
turned immediately into action, an unstoppable wave of
creativity,
energy,
and productivity is unleashed throughout the organization. At GE, Work-Out
"Town Meetings" gave the corporation access to an unlimited resource of
imagination and energy of its talented employees.

Quick and Easy Kaizen
Quick and easy
Kaizen is aimed at
increasing
productivity,
quality, and worker
satisfaction, all from a very grassroots level.
Every company employee is encouraged to come up with ideas however
small that could improve his/her particular job activity, job environment
or any company process for that matter.
The employees are also encouraged to
implement their ideas as small changes can be done by the worker him or
herself with very little investment of time...
More
Three Stages of the Suggestion System
1. Encouragement. In the first stage,
management should make every effort to help the workers provide suggestions,
no matter how primitive, for the betterment of the worker's job and the
workshop. This will help the workers look at the way they are doing their
jobs...
More
Recommendations for Stimulating
Radical Idea Generation...
25 Lessons from Jack
Welch: Get Good Ideas from Anywhere...
Creativity Management in Your
Business Environment...
Inspiring Creative Ideas: Three Factors...
Motivate Radical Idea Generation...
Establish Guiding Principles...
Ask Searching Questions...
Systemic Thinking...
Prototyping...
Rapid Experimentation...
Freedom To Fail...
Learning From Feedback...
Sell Your Ideas to Other Stakeholders...
How To Present Your New Project Idea to
Decision Makers...
A Tool for Evaluating Innovative Ideas...
Letting the Best Idea Win...
Mutual Creativity in Business
Partnerships...
Creative Problem Solving (CPS)...
10 Steps to Turning Your Ideas / Inventions into Big Cash
Wealth...
Case in Point
BMW Soliciting Ideas from External
Innovators...
Case in Point
Citigroup...
Case in Point
Siemens...
Case in Point
Wall-Mart...
Case in Point
Georgia Pacific...

|