Tag: Innovations

In search for creativity?

What is creativity? I would like to define creativity as "individual ability to find novel, unique and useful ideas for a given challenge". This definition has normative connotation - there needs to be a goal for creative behavior. I have found the creativity model first introduced by Professor Teresa Amabile from Harvard, to be very practical. She present (...)

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Innovation: take a big pen and small paper.

Maybe the most important thing when inventing something new is to get started. Get started from the beginning, middle or the end. It does not really matter where you start, as long as you do start. Start with a big pen and small paper. You cannot draw anything small with big pen. This forces you to think about the principles and forget about the details. The details (...)

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Greatest risk is to play always safe

Let us imagine a company that has reached a status of market leadership through its innovative products and services. The road to the leading position may well have been a tough fight against the competition. Innovation work has been successful, and a great deal of the new stuff has been radical: Many products have been something completely new to the market. Through (...)

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Greatest risk is to play always safe

Let us imagine a company that has reached a status of market leadership through its innovative products and services. The road to the leading position may well have been a tough fight against the competition. Innovation work has been successful, and a great deal of the new stuff has been radical: Many products have been something completely new to the market. Through (...)

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It’s the Cave Men around us telling “Nope, wouldn’t work”

Did you know that its a cave man talking when your boss or collague says "No, bad idea"? (...)

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From perfect to remarkable

Each company and every product is going to lose the interest of the consumers at some point of time. What is cool, trendy and interesting to consumers today will not be in few years anymore. When is then the right time to think about the future products? The answer is: yesterday, today and tomorrow - all the time. So, why not deciding to start thriving your business toward (...)

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Nudist Camp of Thinking

Corporate innovation is often limited by unconscious preconditions we bring to the sessions. Our thinking and creativity is limited by our own approach to what we expect we are supposed to do in the company as well as by what we suspect the company is all about. We cannot change the whole company, its vision and strategy, in the brainstorming. But if we are unable to break the (...)

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The greatest innovation inhibitor

We've been recently looking at Nokia's struggle in changing their strategy and finding new alliance to compete in a changed environment. There are quite a few examples of companies that have been very successful in the past and are now struggling with their business. Some say it is just a normal cyclic nature of business and that's how life works. They conclude that nothing rem (...)

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Do you want your product to be unique and cool?

There are plenty of research available which claims that about 90% of the thinking of 5-6 years old children is creative. This includes creativity itself, alternative thinking and surprising ideas. The picture changes a bit when they get older. Namely the creativity of 9 years old children has decreased to 20%. When we reach 40 years of age, only 1% of our thoughts are creative (...)

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Do you have an Innovation process?

If someone asked you if your company had an innovation process, you may say "Yes we have" - based on the fact that you may well have a very sophisticated process for managing R&D projects all the way from the idea through many stage-gates to the commercialization in the end. OK, fine. Has it crossed your mind that no, you do not have an innovation process? Ye (...)

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Thoughts about social media and participative leadership

I am convinced that social media is here to stay and has an effect to the way you do business. You cannot stop it and actually you should not try stop it. The word of mouth, good and bad, will spread. Timing is becoming crucial. Even more crucial it used to be. One day in internet and especially the social media is an eternity. Let's assume you have a problem with (...)

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Innovation is dead

Innovation hits the company The bosses have met consultants that have sold them the idea of creating more value by being innovative. Then starts a time taking and money spending effort of creating processes, buying software and doing internal trainings. In most of the cases all of this is confronted by the workers with a yawn and fatigue. "When does this stop so that (...)

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Ideation with Laughter

A good laugh right before an ideation session can release endorphin to relax participants to have more productive session and less unnecessary criticism. (...)

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How to balance low and high risk projects in R&D work?

How to select the ideas or project which should be discarded and what to proceed with? The key is to understand that R&D is essentially 'betting horses' with a portfolio of projects. And, it basically is irrelevant whether an individual project in the portfolio is a success or a failure. (...)

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Listen less to your customers!

Your future development guidelines cannot be outsourced to your customers. Customer feedback is absolutely essential when you need to improve your current product, do troubleshooting, make bug fixes or make incremental improvements. But: when creating whole new concepts, you have to sit back, use your own brains, think ahead, trust your vision and get on with the development. (...)

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Removing the mysticism around Innovation

In many organization, Innovation as a word is familiar from press releases and CEO reviews only - something that you have to be at least a Vice President to be able to talk about. (...)

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ITER French -Finnish networking event, 16-17 June 08

open innovation on ITER cooperation (...)

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Leading by laughing

Serious laughter makes for happy change (...)

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Inno What?

Where does the name Innotiimi come from? (...)

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Distributed R&D - opportunity or threat?

More and more companies are doing R&D in a distributed mode. Difficulties in alignment, communication, team spirit and the sort can be an obstacle, but can they be solved? (...)

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Assumptions prevent us from seeing opportunities

Have you ever been woken up by the fact that you have missed opportunities only because you have made false assumptions about how things are? (...)

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Let’s scrap the word innovation

What is innovation? Innovation is a buzz word that had been around for quite some time. Obviously everyone needs innovation and is pretty clear why. But what is innovation? (...)

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Should You Reward Bad Ideas?

In order to create good products or services you have to produce an large amount good ideas. In order to create remarkable, great or outstanding products or services (i.e. real innovation) you have to produce a vast amount of ideas: good, neutral, bad, very bad and absolutely crappy ideas. (...)

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Finance (banking) crisis and innovation

As we all know, we are (again) living the times of banking crisis. Someone blames Greece, some other blames Italy or Spain. It is correct that the public sector spending in these countries has been out of control for many years. Having said that the European Banks have also been “very innovative” in pumping large amounts of money into various projects hoping for large profits. (...)

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Innovation Fitness -seminars in Vienna and Köln

Innotiimi and ICG Integrated Consulting Group (Austria) arrange a seminar "Innovation Fitness" in Vienna (April 18th) and in Köln (April 19th). In the seminar, you can learn how to develop innovation capability in your organization, hear international best-practice cases and share experiences of innovation culture development programs. (...)

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Starting is everything!

Every success story in the world has a start. (...)

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Does your business focus on meaningless details and micro management?

Reporting, filling in the figures is various sheets and applications, having meetings and teleconferences to discuss the figures over and over again. Being like a cog in large machine or factory. Feeling numb, brainless and non-creative. Does this sound familiar to you? If not, you can consider yourself lucky. Many medium and large companies often live in a factory culture and (...)

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Efficient creativity tools and innovation methods seminar 31st of May - 1st of June

The purpose of the workshop is to train participants to use concrete tools that help to create novel development ideas and to develop solid development concepts as well as to solve technical problems in innovative way. Participants learn creativity tools, idea generation methods and concept development skills that develop organization's innovation capability in the long run. (...)

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Tribal leadership - improving your business culture part I

…continues from the last week's blog "Does your business focus on meaningless details and micro management?". (...)

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Tribal leadership - improving your business culture part II

…this blog is a continuation to the Tribal Leadership series. The previous article about the stages 1 and 2 can be found here: "Tribal Leadership - improving your business culture part I". This part describes the tribal stages 3 and 4. It makes sense to discuss these two stages at the same time because the leap from stage 3 to stage 4 has the biggest potential for improving you (...)

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Tribal leadership – improving your business culture part III

…this blog is continuation to the Tribal Leadership series. The previous article about the stages 3 and 4 can be found here: "Tribal Leadership - improving your business culture part II". This part describes the tribal stage 5. The tribal stage 5 is the highest cultural stage known today. The stage 5 cultures outperform all the other levels on a long run. (...)

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Tribal leadership – improving your business culture part IV

…this blog is continuation to the Tribal Leadership series. The previous articles discussed the foundation of the tribal leadership as well as introduced you to the stages 1 through 5 in detail. (...)

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Are you outside of your comfort zone?

You are likely either left or right handed. Similarly you cross your arms either left or right arm on top. Also you probably cross your hands either left of right thumb on top. Most of the time, or actually nearly every time, you tend to do it the same way. Could you write with your other hand or could you cross your arms or hands the other way? Of course you could, but most li (...)

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Are you Organized or Chaotic?

this blog is continuation to my previous blog "Are you extrovert or introvert". (...)

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Be aware of innovation traps (Part I)

Have you ever thought about innovation traps? This blog is a starting point for a series of blogs that discusses innovation traps i.e. typical obstacles and challenges that make it difficult to develop new radical innovations and hinder business renewal. Innovation traps are discussed briefly which is followed by some ideas that organization can do to overcome these traps. This (...)

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Monday 11th of March, 2013. Special workshop with Dr. Peter Koen: Front End and Breakthrough Innovations

This one day workshop will explain the Top Quartile Practices in the front end. (...)

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