Innovation: Making Inspiration Routine -- Innovative Companies -- Employee Innovation. In April, A.G. Lafley, the chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG), and Ram Charan, adviser to such business leaders as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli, published an insider's guide to innovation at P&G and other top corporations. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth With Innovation argues that innovation -- like learning -- must be continuous and pursued at all levels of the organization. The book describes dozens of mechanisms for keeping the idea pipeline full, such as P&G's customer-immersion programs, which send employees to live in consumers' homes, and innovation "hot zones," facilities where product teams spend weeks on creative exercises.
It's a great book, but for owners of small companies, it's a little like reading about Disney World when all you have to play with is a backyard swing set. We wondered: Could P&G's approach to innovation be made to scale for businesses with a tiny fraction of P&G's resources? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Google Reveals Its 9 Principles of Innovation. Ever wonder what makes the Google the holy grail of productivity and creativity? There's no magic in the drinking water at the Mountain View, CA company. The tech giant draws from what Google's chief social evangelist, Gopi Kallayil, calls the nine core principles of innovation. Kallayil shared his insights at this week’s San Francisco Dreamforce summit. Here are the nine rules that any enterprise, large or small, can adopt to steal Google’s innovative culture. 1.
Innovation comes from anywhere It can come from the top down as well as bottom up, and in the places you least expect. 2. Worry about the money later, when you focus on the user, all else will follow. End result? 3. If you come into work thinking that you will improve things by ten percent, you will only see incremental change. Google co-founder Larry Page built his own book scanner, and the initial process required having someone manually turn its pages in rhythm, one at a time, according to the pace of a metronome. 4. 5. 6. "Innovation" Has Become a Useless Word.
The 5 Stages of a Breakthrough Idea. How do we know it will work? This question always brings a smile to my face. When my coaching clients discover a critical breakthrough idea in their business, their initial reaction includes a lot of excitement and hope. Then the doubt and fear set in. But breakthrough thinking isn't born of doubt and fear, it's born of the ability to let go, remove limits, suspend judgment, and believe in your unique vision. So the answer is, you never know if it will work. But if you allow the cycle to happen without sabotaging it with doubt and fear, your idea can stand a chance.
When JoAnne took her product to market she was thrilled when a major retail chain picked it up. That's when we thought of co-branding. But JoAnne and her breakthrough had to go through the cycle of patience, endurance, and persistence. Elation Some entrepreneurs spend years searching for the solution to their stagnant sales. Exploration Doubt and Fear Failure Breakthrough! Creativity First, Then Innovation Will Follow. I am officially obsessing about creativity. This has everything to do with all of the content devoted to innovation. Discussions about innovation seem to be everywhere — yet, we don’t seem closer to fully understanding how to cultivate it. Yes, innovation is a critical concept in today’s workplaces. However, I can’t help but think that we might be putting the cart before the horse.
Which leads me to one crux of the innovation dilemma. When it comes to innovation — don’t we need creativity to be there first to pave the road? Where creativity is concerned it is wise to learn from the masters. The ideas Catmull proposes may initially make us a bit uncomfortable — and go against the grain of how we might usually work. Here are a few of Pixar’s strategies to consider: Banish perfectionism. Now go ahead — create. 60 Plus Innovation Tools for Today's Innovator. Almost everyone wants to be known as innovative, to be an innovator. Companies and individuals seek to demonstrate that they are capable of “out of the box” thinking, as the saying goes. I have recently worked on some projects around innovation for companies like Verizon and Qualcomm and it got me to thinking – what about innovation tools to help my fellow small business owners to brainstorm, to create new products, to get rid of the innovation cramp and get the ideas flowing?
Below are 60 plus innovation tools and sites that today’s innovators should check out. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization – well-reviewed book on Amazon that describes different tools you can use to help drive innovation. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.