clair075

I had the opportunity to speak to a leadership team that is considering building an innovation capability in their business.  I was asked a question I get infrequently, but one I enjoy answering.  The question is:  what keeps businesses from innovating effectively?  The answer that I think most leadership teams want is:  good ideas.  After all, it's easier to explain away the lack of innovation if you can say that most teams lack good ideas. But a lack of good ideas is almost never the appropriate response to the question. Most companies teem with reasonably good ideas, and in some cases great ideas.  No, the reasons that corporate innovation fails are many and varied, almost as differentiated as the number of industries and business models and management styles that are in evidence. But there are a number of factors I can describe which severely curtain innovation success when corporations decide to do more innovation.  Those factors include: Fai...

I was scanning through my Twitter feed when I came upon a tweet where someone was excitedly welcoming disruption in the financial sector.  Strangely, it was from an individual employed in the traditional banking sector.  This made me think of the old Simpson's show where Kent Brockman, the news broadcaster, is announcing that there are new alien beings taking over the earth, and that he, for one, welcomed the new overlords. Much like the traditional banker who welcomes financial disruption in his industry, this welcoming of your own destruction seems a bit unlikely. My response is that disruption is something you want to create or anticipate, rather than welcome and react to. Just ask Tower Records if they "welcomed" a disruption in the distribution of modern music.  Tower and other retailers owned music distribution until Apple decided to disrupt the market by changing the media (physical to digital) and the channel (retail stores to web downloads).  As interested b...

It's funny to me to read about the impending death of innovation, or how innovation doesn't add any value, or how often you can read about new innovation methods or techniques when most people haven't ingested the basic tenets yet.  For all the talk about innovation, for all the "I'm so over" innovation eye-rolling, it would be nice to admit a really simple fact that is as plain as the nose on your face:  80% of the people in most organizations simply don't know that much about innovation. I have to remind myself of this constantly, because I'm not going to be surprised anymore by "innovators" in organizations who don't know who Alex Osborne is, or was.  Or can't tell me what Doblin's Ten types of innovation are.  Or cannot adequately define the difference between incremental innovation and disruptive innovation.  Recently at a professional association meeting we were talking about helping our colleagues understand "best prac...