Providing tips, tricks and insights into how to be more creative, innovative, resourceful and personally effective.
Innovation and the Courage to be Wrong
Being willing to fail, to be wrong, is one of the key characteristics of an innovator. You don’t have to like failure, and you certainly don’t want to go looking for it. But you have to be willing to accept it and move on in order to find the rare gems you’re seeking.
Innovation and the Business Ecosystem
Innovation is driving change in the business ecosystem and the dynamics of this change are remarkably similar to those found in nature.
Mindset Comes Before Innovation
Mindset is crucial because it occurs upstream from innovation. It’s the frame of mind we hold that determines whether or not we’re going to be innovative.
The Blue Bird of Unhappiness – and Un-Innovation
As innovators, do we want people who won’t take “No” for an answer? Or, do we want people who pick up on the “No’s” quickly and adjust their thinking to find a creative work around?
Innovation is Not Problem Solving
The most effective innovators don’t wait for problems to arise. They fix what isn’t broken and seek to improve on things that have no apparent deficit.
Innovation Essentials: Unlearning
One of the central challenges innovators manage to overcome is the tendency to cling to past assumptions and beliefs and orthodoxies. Being willing and able to escape that mental inertia is one of the things that most distinguishes innovators. They’re skilled uinlearners.
Innovation Essentials: Mindset
Mindset may the most overlooked strategic issue in business today. Getting yourself and your people into the right frame of mind is becoming a crucial determinant of competitiveness, thanks to two huge business trends.
Innovators Are Effectual Thinkers
Innovators think differently. Corporate executives devote considerable time and resources to making future predictions, which they use to guide their decisions. Whereas entrepreneurs set out to create a future they believe is feasible given what they have to work with and the effects of the actions they take...
Evaluating Innovative Ideas as Stories
There’s something remarkably powerful about a good story. It can take the driest of facts and breathe life into them, and it can do the same thing with an idea. Skilled innovators take their ideas and turn them into stories, often reshaping their assumptions and beliefs in the process.
Innovate Like a Squirrel
The paradox of innovation is that it requires the courage to take risks, yet it’s also grounded in caution, the realization that threats can appear suddenly. Like a squirrel, we need to be constantly scanning for potential threats and opportunities.
It’s Time We Stopped Trying to Buy Creativity
Creative people tend to be intrinsically motivated. This is one of the best researched but least appreciated pieces of the whole innovation equation. It requires a total paradigm shift in the way companies think about motivating employees and what behaviors are valued.
The Gold Rush for Innovation Talent
So how in the world do you measure, much less develop, someone’s innovation mindset? We’ve found a way to do exactly that, using a unique research-based assessment that calibrates a person’s attitudes, assumptions and beliefs as they relate to the whole range of behaviors that are necessary for successful innovation.