Managing Innovation:

Managing Ideas

Managing Creativity in Your Business Environment

Demystifying the Creative Process and Encouraging Disciplined Creativity

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."  

– Scott Adams 

Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements

Corporate Capabilities (Water):

• Effective creativity. idea, and knowledge management systems are established... More

12 Breakthrough Ideas for the New Economy

Source: Harvard Economic Review Executive summary by Anastasia Bibikova.

The best ideas related to the practice of management. If you know somebody has used them, don’t try to repeat. Simply consider them, debate them and let them inspire your own thinking!...

2. Monopoly on Creativity: What is nowadays’ key economic resource? It was proved that only creative people can “reach the moon” and make the company flourish... More

9 Signs of a Losing Organization

4. High Bureaucracy: bureaucratic organizational structures with too many layers; high boundaries between management layers; slow decision making; too close monitoring of things and subordinates; too many tools and documents discouraging creative thinking... More

How To Lead Creative People

By: Max DePree

10 Ways To Murder Creativity

• Ask for a 200-page document to justify every new idea... More

Creativity Sells

"Creativity" is the hottest buzzword in business today: Everybody wants to be creative. All companies are searching for any worthwhile innovation that captures the public's imagination and strengthens the company's brand.

Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurial creativity is about coming up with ideas and converting them into innovative business activities. The creativity in the entrepreneur is combined with the ability to innovate, to take the idea and make it work in practice... More

The Way Our Mind Works

Our brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, and each hemisphere specializes in different functions, processes different kinds of information, and deals with different kinds of problems.

The left brain works more with logic and analysis, the right works more with emotions and imagination. Intuitive, emotional, and creative work is performed by our right brain.

You must divide time between the left-brain and right-brain activity to achieve better creativity results. If you keep bouncing back and forth between creative and analytical activities, you'll get a headache and won't produce your best results. Analysis, evaluation and judgment get in the way of creativity. That's why in brainstorming sessions we suspend judgment while we generate ideas. Similarly, radical innovation project managers apply the loose-tight leadership technique to divide time between divergent and convergent thinking by their team members at different project stages.

The Jazz of Innovation

The improvisation-driven model for innovation project management doesn’t 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

Cross-Pollinate Ideas

Winning innovative solutions are inspired and developed in the process of cross-pollination of ideas, rather than narrowly focused search... More

Harnessing the Creative Power of Your Employees

Generate a corporate climate that encourages rule-breakers, iconoclasts and outside-the-box thinkers. "The best way to create value is to innovate your way ahead of the competition in order to create temporary monopolies where yours in the only show in town. You can do this by harnessing the creative power of your greatest asset, your people. The goal is to turn them into opportunistic entrepreneurs who are constantly looking for new ways of doing business."⁵

 Best Practices  Google: 10 Golden Rules

• Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top... More

Inspirational Leadership: 10 Roles

Inspirational leaders create an inspiring culture within their organization. They supply a shared vision and inspire people to achieve more than they may ever have dreamed possible. They are able to articulate a shared vision in a way that inspires others to act. They encourage entrepreneurial creativity and experimentation.

People do what they have to do for a manager, they do their best for an inspirational leader... More

 Case in Point  Toyota Production System (TPS)

Toyota’s global competitive advantage is based on a corporate philosophy known as the Toyota Production System (also known as Lean Manufacturing) aimed at systematic elimination of 7 wastes – overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, motion, over-processing, defective units – and the implementation of the concepts of continuous flow and customer pull. The system depends also on a human resources management policy that stimulates employee creativity... More

16 Ways to Avoid the Hassle of Commercializing University Technology

By: Terry Collison

Have no defined policy or procedure at all on commercializing university technology. Defining the groundrules, requirements, and procedures could cause a lot of debate and disagreement. Allow faculty members to be creative. (The university’s rights and responsibilities can always be figured out later if you need to.)... More

References:

1. The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley

2. Direct from Dell, Michael Dell with Catherine Fredman

3. Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch with John A. Byrne. Executive summary by Soundview

4. How To Kill a Team's Creativity, Sethi R., Smith D. and Park W., Harvard Business Review

5. Improve Your Lateral Thinking: Puzzles To Challenge Your Mind, Paul Sloane

6. Stories and Analogies, BusinessBalls.com

7. Entrepreneurial Creativity, Vadim Kotelnikov

8. The Jazz of Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

9. SMART Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

10. Managing Radical Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

11. Systemic Innovation, Vadim Kotelnikov

12. Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Great Ideas Rolling, Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff