Category: innovation strategy
-
Where to focus next?
A few of my clients are preparing to wind down their manufacturing and engineering activities for the Christmas break. This is especially true for my clients in the Southern Hemisphere, where at least half of December is the holiday season. Clients with a retail business model are most likely now planning for the busiest time…
-
Strategy means saying “No!”
At the start of this year, I want to share some advice I received from Prof David Maister many years ago. David Maister was an early podcaster in the 2000s and I loved listening to his podcast. Maister argued that many leaders are trained to say “yes” and then they get stretched so thin that…
-
How you can use Slack and MS Teams to foster knowledge management and information sharing
I am a member of several Slack and MS Teams workspaces, and I am often struck by how little organisations I work with invest in making these digital workspaces valuable instruments to nurture ideas, develop knowledge in a distributed way or share information in a way that saves people time. I prefer Slack over Teams,…
-
How to kickstart innovation in my team?
This is the question that I receive most often from leaders. Where do I start with improving innovation in my organisation or department? Often this goes along with a sigh and a statement like “once upon a time we were very innovative, but then we settled down”. Often, the leaders that ask me about innovation…
-
Now is the time to think about what is next after what is next
Updated and improved on 18 April 2020, Originally published, March 19 2020 I have found the past month a bit surreal, to say the least. When I travelled through an international airport at the end of January I saw paramedics treating a person who had collapsed. The paramedics were not wearing masks and gloves, while a…
-
Much of innovation is mundane
I love facilitating thinking and reflection session with teams. However, there is one kind of request that I often decline, and that is a request to facilitate an annual innovation strategy rethink. I get many such requests towards the end of the year as organisations start thinking of the coming year and their “agenda” for…
-
Four functions of innovation and technology management
This article is meant for my business clients and colleagues managing technology transfer and innovation extension services. In the past I have written much about the professionals and organisations who are responsible for helping entrepreneurs to improve and strengthen their innovation portfolios on my personal blog site. To recapitulate: I believe that many industries are…
-
The importance of the middle management layer for innovation
I love reading material and listening to podcasts about innovation and organisational change. One thing that strikes me is that a lot of the material focuses on the role of the leadership at the top of the organisation. This is at odds with my daily experience of working in small and medium-sized organisations. In most…
-
Innovation strategy metaphors: building bridges or strengthening bases
I have been inspired by some of the metaphors developed by Sonja Blignaut in her blog. She uses these metaphors to help leaders understand polarities, balance and strategic fit. I therefore thought that I should write up two metaphors that I often use when helping leaders to decide where to focus their strategic innovation attempts.…
-
Instigating innovation inside organisations and networks
For the last four years I have been working on this idea of catalysing or instigating innovation (take a look at my “thinking out loud blog“). It is about what leaders at different points in organisations or networks can do to improve their systems, products, environments and structures. Central to innovation is the generation, recognition…