Innovation
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How and Why To Ask Better Questions

Mar-27-18. By Scott Berkun

To ask a good question requires two things: an insight and gumption. The root of all worthy questions is a desire to fill in a gap in your understanding of something. The insight in good questions comes from seeing that gap, exploring its edges and forming a question from them that can serve as an invitation to others to fill it.

How to Measure and Communicate Innovation

Mar-26-18. By Alex Goryachev

Innovation is not a buzzword -- it is an essential ingredient in an organization’s ability to compete in today’s digital age. By being open to ideas from anyone, anywhere inside or outside your company, you can disrupt markets, create new business opportunities and solve customers’ most pressing challenges.

How Creativity and Innovation is Being Used to Improve Society

Mar-22-18. By Ryan Ayers

Creativity and societal problems have not always been closely associated. In the national dialogue, fixing these problems involves a series of concrete steps—steps designed to create concrete processes and repeatable outcomes. As we learn more about why these problems occur, however, we’re also learning more about how to treat them, which can involve a healthy dose of creativity and innovation.

The Five Types of People You Need to Facilitate Innovation

Mar-16-18. By Michael Deane

Having the right people on your start-up’s team – especially in its early days – can mean the difference between unparalleled success and embarrassing failure. The best founders and leaders know that success does not come from one person acting alone, but a team of professionals and industry experts who work together to create something truly amazing.

How to Make Innovation a Predictable Process

Mar-15-18. By Alastair Dryburgh

Is there a manageable, predictable process for product innovation? Many people would say no, but Josh Valman contends that there is. And he has credentials in that area as CEO of RPD International, who work on product innovation with the likes of Unilever, Bosch and GSK.

Increasing Experimentation And Autonomy Capability: The New Corporate Innovation Imperative

Mar-15-18. By Anthony Ferrier

In the past 12 months, there has been a concerted push to foster a more experimental and autonomous workforce within mature, corporate organizations. This is impacting how innovation professionals operate, drive value, and ultimately succeed in their own careers.

How to Defeat "Loss Aversion"

Mar-11-18. By Nick Skillicorn

In this article, you are going to learn exactly what Loss Aversion is, why is creates crippling fear in middle managers and decision-makers, and a simple model for how you can reframe your company’s thinking which encourages more innovation projects to thrive.

How to Solve a Really Tough Problem in 3 (Not So Easy) Steps

Mar-07-18. By Greg Satell

The key to solving fundamental challenges is to go both wider and deeper. We need to understand problems on a fundamental level and then in search of new perspectives, both from experts in other fields and seeking out new experiences ourselves. Innovation is never about individual nodes. It’s always about networks.

The Proof That We're All Creative

Mar-06-18. By Scott Berkun

For most of history people did not use the word creativity very much. They just invented and discovered things in the course of their lives without applying special labels to them. But something strange happened to in modern times. We developed a romance around the notion of creativity. Most people today think of it as an extra layer of cognitive powers, that only special people have. This is untrue and there’s an easy way to prove it.

Better Brainstorming

Mar-05-18. By Hal Gregersen

Brainstorming for questions, not answers, wasn’t something I’d tried before. It just occurred to me in that moment, probably because I had recently been reading sociologist Parker Palmer’s early work about creative discovery through open, honest inquiry. But this technique worked so well with the students that I began experimenting with it in consulting engagements, and eventually it evolved into a methodology that I continue to refine.

You Cannot Survive doing More of the Same

Mar-05-18. By Jeffrey Phillips

Today, the pace of change is accelerating and it is faster than ever. Perhaps not in how we humans evolve - but definitely in terms of how businesses and technologies evolve. In the not so distant past, businesses prided themselves and their products on being "build to last". Today, we need to think more about "built to change", more agile, more nimble and more creative than in the past.

Why Innovation Fails

Feb-28-18. By Tendayi Viki

Getting our teams to generate a lot of great ideas is just the beginning. Successful innovation is the combination of great ideas with sustainably profitable business models. In my experience corporations have a much bigger problem - what to do with good ideas once we have them.

When 'More' is 'Less' in Crowdsourcing Innovation

Feb-22-18. By Gregory Hicks

In most organizations, there is an omnipresent quest for more. With crowdsourcing innovation programs, the first impulse is to seek more ideas. Is more really better? What about idea quality? Does 'more ideas' work against idea quality? The goal needs to be quality.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

Feb-20-18. By Caitlin Stanway-Williams

So how can companies maintain their existence in this perpetual state of 'day 1-ness'? We spoke to four of our speakers, past and present, about how they keep up a startup atmosphere that's ripe for innovation.

How to Execute a Successful Innovation Strategy

Feb-16-18. By Keith Bendes

The issue many companies face today with innovation is their tendency to overcommit to a single quadrant by either being too optimistic and wanting all innovation to be revolutionary or being too cautious and staying in their comfort zones. Both typically lead to failure and a perception that the company must get back to the core business and shed its innovation efforts. The key to a successful innovation strategy is to diversify investments across all four quadrants of the innovation matrix.

4 Ways to Build an Innovative Team

Feb-13-18. By Greg Satell

It seems like everybody these days is looking for an early version of Steve Jobs. Yet I found that most great innovators were nothing like the mercurial stereotype. In fact, almost all of them were kind, generous, and interested in what I was doing. Many were soft-spoken and modest. You would notice very few of them in a crowded room.

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence can help Save the Planet

Feb-12-18. By Ben Schiller

Artificial intelligence systems that can sense, think, learn, and act on their own could allow a major upgrade in conservation efforts, in dealing with climate change, and living in a more energy-efficient manner. A report released during the recent Davos World Economic Forum meeting laid more than 80 potential environmental applications for AI, ranging from the mundane to the futuristic.

Innovation is about Making Progress, Not Running Experiments

Feb-11-18. By Tendayi Viki

Innovation is the combination of creative new ideas with sustainably profitable business model. Regardless of the idea you are working on or how cool and amazing it is, eventually you have to solve for this equation; are you able to deliver value to customers in a way that is sustainably profitable?

Why Your Best Innovators Leave Your Company - at the Worst Possible Moment

Feb-08-18. By Nick De Mey

If a truly valued innovator is preparing to pack their bags, you could take a cue from the Adobe Systems Kick-box. Give the employees you believe in the kick-box of all kick-boxes: let them have free reign on a $100,000 budget and the expertise of leaders in the company. Tell them to come back in 6 months’ time with the solution they’re dying to pursue. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Are the Most Innovative Companies Just the Ones with the Most Data?

Feb-07-18. By Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Thomas Ramge

The trouble is that the source of innovation is shifting – from human ingenuity to data-driven machine-learning. Of course, it takes plenty of talented, creative people to build these products. But their improvement is driven less by a human “aha-moment” than by data and improvements in how machines learn from it.

Impact Assessment: The Innovation Paradigm Shift that is Coming

Feb-06-18. By David Cembrero, Lidia Gryszkiewicz, Dariusz Sikora

In the context of business management and economics, innovation has mainly been considered as a source of profit and growth. But innovation can also have a transformative role and recently more and more innovators and entrepreneurs are not only considering the financial returns of their projects, but also the societal impacts that they might bring with them.

How to Drive More Innovation in your Workforce

Jan-30-18. By Suzan Briganti

If you are willing to consider that some people are more innovative than others, and that innovation talent can now be measured, you can make massive advances in your innovation program. We invite you to discover three levers to increasing your innovation success, talent selection, talent organization and talent development. For perspective on this problem, we asked Steve Haraguchi, who has directed innovation programs at both Stanford and MIT.

5 Ways to Puncture Stagnation and Innovate Innovation

Jan-26-18. By Tom Zender

Nothing new. Your company has few if any new products. Yet competition is on a creative binge. This is the path to terminal stagnation. You can wait until someone in the organization comes up with the next winning idea. Dangerous. Or, you can build an intensely innovative culture. In other words, innovate innovation. How?

Davos 2018: Top Universities ‘Boost Innovation more than Nations’

Jan-25-18. By Simon Baker

A small group of fewer than 30 universities are having a bigger impact on the inventions driving global economic growth than the world’s major industrialised nations, a data analysis by Times Higher Education suggests.

Why Companies and Universities Should Forge Long-Term Collaborations

Jan-24-18. By Kenneth R. Lutchen

In the last decade, there has been an explosion in the number of research deals between companies and universities. Companies, which have been reducing their spending on early-stage research (basic and applied or translational) for three decades, have been increasingly turning to universities to perform that role, seeking access to the best scientific and engineering minds in specific domains.

Freedom to Fail, Freedom to Innovate

Jan-23-18. By Eugene Ivanov

Everyone seems to agree that innovation is a risky business: it involves a lot of experimentation, which often ends up in failure. High tolerance for failure therefore can be considered as a major prerequisite for any successful innovation program.

Lessons from Tech Leaders who Skipped School to Learn & Innovate

Jan-15-18. By Ryan Ayers

These days, it’s not easy to get a job without a college degree—unless, of course, you create one for yourself, something entrepreneurs have been doing throughout human history. Starting your own business is the best way to prioritize your ideas and bring them to life.

Open Innovation: Research, Practices and Policies

Jan-10-18. By Marcel Bogers, Henry Chesbrough, Carlos Moedas

Open innovation will play a key role in the developed economies over the next decade. There will be new technological trends that will fuel innovation, from blockchain to digitalization to genomic editing. Innovation itself will continue to evolve, and so policy must also be prepared to adjust.

Why the Rewards for Ambitious Problem Solving Are About to Get Bigger

Jan-08-18. By Greg Satell

In the coming years we are likely to see a new era of innovation that will look more like the 1950s and 1960s than it will the 1990s or 2000s. In the next few decades, I predict, much of innovation’s value will shift away from applications and back to fundamental problems. That will require greater focus on sustaining efforts to solve grand challenges.

The 15 Enemies of Innovation

Jan-04-18. By Jorge Barba

Innovative organizations understand that innovation has many enemies, some seen and others unseen, and its leaders are actively involved in keeping them at bay. What enemies?
As they grow and mature, established organizations develop many obstacles that impede innovation. The biggest obstacle to transformation is human nature; this is why innovation is as much about attitude and perspective as it is about process.

Wisdom of the Crowd Accurately Predicts Supreme Court Decisions

Dec-26-17. By Emerging Technology from the arXiv

FantasySCOTUS is an online fantasy league in which contestants compete by predicting decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court. Players are ranked as in any fantasy league, and the best performers can win prizes such as a “Golden Gavel” and even $10,000 in cash.

Open Innovation Generates Great Ideas, So Why Aren't Companies Adopting Them?

Dec-20-17. By Dirk Deichmann, Ieva Rozentale, Robert Barnhoorn

Our research suggests the reasons more ideas from open innovation aren’t being adopted are political and cultural, not technical. Multiple gatekeepers, skepticism regarding anything “not invented here,” and turf wars all hold back adoption. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

5 Industries Machine Learning is Disrupting

Dec-08-17. By Gary Read

We talk about artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and machine learning as if they’re coming soon, or are just some tech pipe dream. They’re not. They’re here today. In fact, a special report from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch predicts the global market for AI and robots will be just under $153 billion by 2020, and some industries will experience up to a 30% productivity increase through the use of those technologies alone.

The New Plants that could Save Us from Climate Change

Dec-03-17. By Avery Thompson

Plants are incredible organisms. They tend to be very simple, only requiring a little CO2, water, and oxygen in order to live, but they’re capable of tremendous diversity and adaptability. Dr. Joanne Chory is using that information to create new plant varieties that could pull incredible amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere and dramatically reduce the effects of climate change.

Innovation Simplified

Dec-01-17. By Shanta R. Yapa

The objective of this short article is not to explain the breadth and the depth of the domain of innovation. Instead, this is an attempt to simplify innovation and encourage you to better understand and practice it. Is your organization innovative? How many new products and processes you introduced in the past one year? How do you compare the numbers with other players in the industry and also with the globally best? This write up will enable you to understand and practice innovation by answering the following questions. When to innovate? Where to innovate? How to innovate?

What Your Language Says About Your Innovtion

Nov-30-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

If you want big ideas, you need to encourage them, yes, but also talk about them in ways that open up dialog, thinking and idea generation to a much larger dimension. While language, word choice and conversation may not seem to have all that much impact on idea generation and innovation, in reality these are the building blocks of a corporate culture. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying: we need to switch from "I'll believe it when I see it" to "I'll see it when I believe it".

12 Ways to Make Bad Decisions

Nov-28-17. By Mitch Ditkoff

There are three things that astound me about most organizations: The cro-magnon way performance reviews are done; the pitiful way brainstorm sessions are run and; the voo doo way decisions are made. What follows is an elaboration of the third -- 12 common phenomena that contribute to funky decision making.

Starting the Innovation Fire

Nov-28-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

I've been thinking, long and hard, about the correct analogy to describe a lot of corporate innovation efforts. I'm sorry to say that the best analogy I can come up with is a campfire. Let's map what's going on in corporate settings to the ingredients for a campfire, to understand what's underway, what's working and what's missing in corporate innovation.

Platform Models are the New Order of our Innovating Business Need

Nov-28-17. By Paul Hobcraft

Increasingly we are looking constantly for better value. We are increasingly restless and explorative. The big question for many companies that simply sell products is can they benefit from making changes in these platform models. How do they go about it to capitalize on this restlessness and constant need of new experiences? Is the stand-alone product model breaking down? Do the more traditional approaches to customers, those that are more supply sided, still serve their needs today? The answer is no, platforms are building very different connected experience for customers, they are voting with their digital clicks to move their business to these offerings. Are you building platform businesses? You should.

Machine Learning and Big Data Know It Wasn’t You Who Just Swiped Your Credit Card

Nov-27-17. By Jungwoo Ryoo

You’re sitting at home minding your own business when you get a call from your credit card’s fraud detection unit asking if you’ve just made a purchase at a department store in your city. It wasn’t you who bought expensive electronics using your credit card — in fact, it’s been in your pocket all afternoon. So how did the bank know to flag this single purchase as most likely fraudulent?

Starting an Innovation Lab? Avoid these Pitfalls

Nov-20-17. By Robert B. Tucker

Often, it appears, companies are seeing the need to showcase how innovative they are. And the solution seems to be to build a flashy new work environment, install bean bags, foosball tables, whiteboards, and cold-brew some coffee and voila, we’ve got ourselves a lab. I’m a bit of a skeptic about these labs.

How the Next Generation is Building our (Artificial Intelligent) Future

Nov-19-17. By Erik P.M. Vermeulen

Young people are no longer satisfied with the prospect of becoming anonymous cogs in a larger corporate machine. Disruptive new technologies have already led to profound cultural shifts in attitudes towards consumption, work, education, energy and health. Technology helps make the world more transparent, authentic and open.

Don’t “Fiddle” with the Crowd – Ask it Better Questions Instead

Nov-15-17. By Eugene Ivanov

The lack of understanding that the most crucial factor that defines the ultimate success or failure of any crowdsourcing campaign is the ability to properly identify, define and articulate the problem that the crowd will be asked to solve. I call it the “80:20 rule”: 80% of unsuccessful crowdsourcing campaigns I’m aware of failed because of the inability to properly formulate the question to be presented to the crowd; only 20% did so because of a poor match between the question and the crowd.

Shared Innovation Language Accelerates Innovation

Nov-13-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

Language and common definitions are critical to any interaction. When each party has their own definitions of innovation and rather narrow definitions at that, little can be accomplished and many opportunities are left by the wayside. Stopping to create a shared definition, expanding the range of opportunities and options, means we can explore more together.

The Innovation Mindset Simplified

Nov-08-17. By Jorge Barba

Curiosity and empathy are the foundation for innovation. You have to get curious about what’s happening, and about people. This means that to innovate you have to ask more interesting questions, observe and learn more. You have to develop a big appetite for knowledge because you want to expand your perspective by having many mental models to use when taking on challenges.

The Theory of Innovation

Nov-06-17. By Langdon

What, then, would constitute a “theory of innovation”? What value, then, could a theory of “innovation” offer in this setting where creativity is an essential element? We must begin with some definitions, which will also provide the foundation for our theory.

Building Upon the Four Essential Pillars for Innovation

Nov-06-17. By Paul Hobcraft

We are in urgent need to build a clear innovation architecture as we do need this new business innovation capability. We are entering a different innovation era and if we don’t pay specific attention to the architecture of innovation we will not have a bright future, we will increasingly fall behind those that do get the need for serious investment in building innovation capability and capacity.

What is the Goal of Automation?

Nov-03-17. By Jorge Barba

The most common goal, from a corporate point of view, is to reduce the cost of human labor and thus increase the profits of the business. But that shouldn’t be the only perspective. I’ve yet to encounter business leaders who think about automation from the perspective of the person who should benefit the most from it: the customer.

How to Launch a Product without Starting a Business

Nov-02-17. By Stephen Key

You don't have to drain your savings account or quit your day job to get a concept off the ground. You don't need co-founders, investors, or even to write a business plan. From the advent of rapid prototyping and crowdfunding to the widespread affordability of digital tools and technologies, the opportunities available to creative people today are fundamentally different -- and enormously exciting.

Why Companies Should Hire Teams, Not Individuals

Oct-29-17. By Sydney Finkelstein

Why would a company ever outsource anything? In part, it may be because teams of talented operators have already demonstrated excellence in a specialized task or function, and it’s easier or cheaper to tap those teams than to create new teams of your own.

What Collaboration Is and Is Not

Oct-28-17. By Ramkumar Yaragarla

Collaboration is way of working with others with shared understanding to achieve mutual goals. Sometimes collaboration goes outside of our comfort zone to accomplish goals. It is critical to understand it to be more effective at it.

Understanding the Future Leads to Better Innovation

Oct-24-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

Even if you aren't interested in innovation, but merely want to remain competitive and keep pace with your industry and your competitors, understanding trends and predicting the potential direction of your industry and customer base is vital. It's the minimum to simply keep up with your market. Good innovators will be looking for clues to find the big shifts that they can take advantage of.

Will Stronger Borders Weaken Innovation?

Oct-23-17. By Barry Jaruzelski, Volker Staack, Robert Chwalik

The political rhetoric of economic nationalism has grown heated in recent years. The clarion call often sounds for more restrictive trade or immigration policies that supporters believe will promote growth and employment at home. Studies have shown that a number of countries have embraced this mind-set to varying degrees, adopting policies that favor domestic industry and companies.

For True Innovation, Don’t Rely On Your Own Ideas

Oct-23-17. By Daniel Terdiman

Internally, company executives have coined a phrase that gets to the heart of these goals: “Break the glass.” That means not just relying on internal thinking and ideas, but going out to “actually sit next to customers, go to their homes,” Harris says. “Not just consumers, but bartenders and other stakeholders in the industry.”

Where the Streets are Paved with Ideas

Oct-18-17. By Richard Florida

Innovation is geographically uneven. The world's 40 richest mega-regions — expansive conurbations such as the Boston–New York–Washington DC corridor, Greater London, or the passage that runs from Shanghai to Beijing — account for more than 85% of the world's patents, and 83% of the most-cited scientists. And yet, only 18% of the world's population lives in them.

How Blockchain could give us a Smarter Energy Grid

Oct-16-17. By Mike Orcutt

Energy experts believe that blockchain technology can solve a maze of red tape and data management problems. In the longer term, Jesse Morris envisions a world in which homes and buildings are equipped with software that automatically sells and buys power to and from the grid on the basis of real-time price signals.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Have Taken Centre Stage - Here's Why

Oct-12-17. By Mahesh Pancholi

The real success of true AI will be in connecting disparate High Performance Computing systems and frameworks together. Figuring out how to connect them altogether is incredibly complex and presents as a true challenge, but when this issue is solved, we’ll surely be entering the golden age of research computing.

4 Ways Leaders can get more from their Company's Innovation Efforts

Oct-10-17. By Greg Satell

A recent McKinsey report found that while 84% of corporate executives think innovation is key to achieving growth objectives, only 6% are satisfied with the innovation performance of their firm. That’s quite a mismatch. It’s hard to imagine that a success rate that low would be tolerated in any other business function.

Data from 3.5 Million Employees Shows How Innovation Really Works

Oct-09-17. By Dylan Minor, Paul Brook, Josh Bernoff

Sales and marketing were once disciplines ruled by emotions. But somewhere along the way, we recognized that they were based on definable pipelines and applied technology to manage those pipelines. Today you can put a corporate dashboard in place to manage them and tweak the settings to try to boost your results. What if we applied the same thinking to innovation?

How AI Will Keep You Healthy

Oct-03-17. By David Ewing Duncan

An audacious Chinese entrepreneur wants to test your body for everything. But are computers really smart enough to make sense of all that data?

The Billion Dollar Breakthrough You Missed

Sep-29-17. By Gregg Fraley

Fresh combinations of technologies, processes, materials, people, trends, concepts, and other factors are what creates innovation. It’s interesting that large organizations with lots of intellectual property don’t systematically examine what they can combine to innovate. It’s a big missing, and, an opportunity to improve.

Every Company Needs an Innovation Coach

Sep-20-17. By Braden Kelley

Innovation is not a solo activity. While the rare lone genius may be able to invent something on their own (although still always inspired by others), nobody can innovate by themselves. Innovation, by its very nature, requires collaboration.

Context Matters in Successful Innovation

Sep-19-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

I think we often over complicate the work of innovation, because we believe it cannot be simple and straightforward. After all, how can an activity that can disrupt an industry, create compelling new products or services and reap significant riches be simple? To drive all of this change, certainly innovation must be difficult and complex, right?

Mastering Global Innovation through Multicultural Collaboration

Sep-19-17. By Karina Jensen

Culturally diverse views bring valuable insights to local problems and issues that are pertinent to solving international challenges. In today’s constantly changing business environment, we need to pay more attention to local voices in order to orchestrate innovation around the world. Listening and learning from culturally diverse perspectives nurtures an open and creative mind.

36 Cognitive Biases that Inhibit Innovation

Sep-19-17. By Steve Glaveski

While we - human beings - like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, the truth is we are anything but. We are prone to over 100 cognitive biases that may subconsciously shape our perceptions, beliefs and decisions. As one might imagination, innovation and entrepreneurship is not immune from said biases.

Want To Build A Culture Of Innovation? Give Your Employees More Autonomy

Sep-15-17. By Elizabeth Lee

In a survey by McKinsey, 94% of senior executives said that it’s the people and corporate culture that drive innovation. Hierarchical structures where the decision-maker is difficult to reach and the decision-making process is not transparent do not foster innovation. That’s why employees need a degree of autonomy to execute actions and set their innovation goals.

Jumping to a Fresh Cycle of Innovation Design

Sep-15-17. By Paul Hobcraft

There is this need to have a new cycle of innovative design. We need a really radical way forward on innovation, a highly adaptive solution, where all these solution parts are available on demand, constantly adjusting and adaptable to the situation you have to resolve. We build a process that relates to the problem on hand in its structure, offering the suggested process needed in frames, tools, process designs.

12 Essential Innovation Insights

Sep-12-17. By Bruce Posner, Martha E. Mangelsdorf

Business innovation has to do with new value, not necessarily new things — and comes in many flavors. The authors presented an “innovation radar” so companies can consider 12 different areas in which they might innovate — ranging from method of value capture to operating processes to platforms. “When a company identifies and pursues neglected innovation dimensions, it can change the basis of competition and leave other firms at a distinct disadvantage,” the authors concluded.

Work Smart: How AI Machines are Making Us More Efficient

Sep-07-17. By Michael Feindt

Artifical Intelligence (AI) is now being used to transform businesses, meaning companies are better positioned to provide consumers with the experience that they both demand and expect. But despite the respite the rise of the machine presents staff, conversations regarding automation are often littered with fear over the potential loss of jobs. This shouldn‘t be the case, instead, businesses and staff need to recognise the introduction of AI as the start of a new era where staff can ‘work smart‘ and become increasingly effective.

Artificial Intelligence and Big Data: Good for Innovation?

Sep-07-17. By Robert Seamans

AI has the potential to provide many benefits to our economy and society. However, startups and established firms that are just beginning to use AI need access to data in order to train their AI systems. Difficulty in accessing the necessary data can create a barrier to entry, potentially reducing competition and innovation.

Mark Sagar Made a Baby in His Lab. Now it Plays the Piano

Sep-07-17. By Ashlee Vance

BabyX, the virtual creation of Mark Sagar and his researchers, looks impossibly real. If it sounds odd to encounter a virtual child that can read words from a book, it’s much more disorienting to feel a sense of fatherly pride after she nails a bunch in a row and lights up with what appears to be authentic joy. BabyX and I seemed to be having a moment, learning from each other while trading expressions and subtle cues so familiar to the human experience.

The Science Behind the Growing Importance of Collaboration

Sep-06-17. By Emily Stone

Collaboration is a hot buzzword in the business world. And with good reason. Working with people who have different perspectives or areas of expertise can result in better ideas and outcomes.

Innovation has a Hard Job to Align

Sep-05-17. By Paul Hobcraft

We need to recognize that innovation is one of the hardest things to align to strategy. It’s inherently messy, fairly unpredictable and its team-orientated approach sometimes cuts across borders, challenges different established positions and seemingly conflicting priorities.

Time, Energy and Attention are the Only Things We Invest that We Can't Get Back

Aug-29-17. By Jorge Barba

Innovation happens at work when a few things are true, two of them are organizational support and rewarding bravery; both critical for a culture of innovation. As a leader or manager you have to remember that people don’t leave their jobs, they leave their managers.The reason is simple: It’s critical for people to feel like they’re making progress. Enthusiasm is oxygen, and people’s spirit dies if you kill it.

Artificial Intelligence Will Create New Kinds of Work

Aug-26-17. By The Economist

AI will eliminate some forms of this digital labour—software, for instance, has got better at transcribing audio. Yet AI will also create demand for other types of digital work. The technology may use a lot of computing power and fancy mathematics, but it also relies on data distilled by humans.

You Don't Lack Time to Innovate. You Lack Allocation and Purpose.

Aug-24-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

But what if everyone in your company had to account for their time, and what if everyone had a specific time allocation for innovation? That might differ depending on the individual, their experience and interest in innovation of course, but what if at the end of each year you could look across your team and see how much time an individual spent building innovation skills and contributing to innovation projects. Wouldn't that be valuable as a manager?

A Study Shows How to Find New Ideas Inside and Outside the Company

Aug-18-17. By Linus Dahlander, Siobhan O'Mahony

We discovered that experts with a broad external network were more innovative only when they devoted enough time and attention to those sources. For instance, people who interacted with eight different types of partners were only more innovative if they allocated half of their time outside the organization. Those who spent more time cultivating external relationships reported higher innovation outcomes, in terms of either patent quantity or quality. When people created a broad external network but did not spend adequate time learning how to use the information gained, the costs of being more distant from the organization and engaging in external networking outweighed the benefits of identifying novel information.

We Need to Think About Failure Differently to Drive Innovation

Aug-18-17. By Jorge Barba

An established organization maintains stability because they’re specialized on optimizing their existing business model to deliver more of what already works. While this is great and keeps the wheels turning it’s also why they’re set up to fail because their experience and success is a straight jacket that’s hard to shake out off; put simply: Your internal culture is the biggest enemy to innovation.

Two Simple Concepts for Getting the Most from Absurd Ideas

Aug-17-17. By George E.L. Barbee

A senior team member kicks things off with a fairly interesting idea, but comfortably within the ballpark of what your company does. People begin jumping in, pinging off of that idea, proposing innovations not too different from those your company has already tried. Then it happens: Someone utters a truly original, off-the-wall idea. The room suddenly gets quiet. Everyone waits to see how the boss will react.

What 11 CEOs Have Learned about Championing Diversity

Aug-17-17. By Stefanie K. Johnson

The business case for diversity is clear. Diversity can boost innovation and employee engagement, and companies with greater gender and racial diversity financially outperform their peers. Yet progress within organizations has been slow – there is still a lack of women and minorities in leadership positions, and certain industries like tech and finance are lacking diversity at all levels.

Why AI is the Ultimate Sales Hack

Aug-13-17. By George Beall

The best lead gen tools will always be people; having the opportunity to spend one on one time with targets, listening to their goals and frustrations is a dream for every sales person. But it’s not realistic. Luckily, organizations like LeadCrunch are enhancing AI-fueled lead-gen platforms that enable organizations to understand customers on an individual basis so that they can eventually connect with them, person-person throughout the sales cycle. Providing a holistic B2B demand generation solution, it uses an effective combination of AI technology and human verification to engage the best targets for your customer base.

8 High Schoolers who are Inventing the Future

Aug-10-17. By Phil McKinney

The play instinct is something that everyone is born with. From a young age we want to explore, create, and have fun. However, some people become very good at honing this skill, at playing and fiddling so creatively that they develop revolutionary technologies. Sometimes these discoveries can come later in life, but many times it is younger individuals, who have held onto their playful spirit, who innovate in extraordinary ways and in the process, play a role in inventing the future.

Shift Your Mindset to Think Exponentially

Aug-03-17. By Jorge Barba

Technology non-believers need to understand that innovation is rarely disruptive; the media and pundits have taken that word and made it meaningless. What is certain is businesses who were not born with a digital first perspective are currently being forced to make the transition to a digital business. Making this transition requires a new type of leadership; an exponential mindset.

5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong about Artificial Intelligence

Jul-31-17. By Luis Perez-Breva

There are a lot of myths out there about artificial intelligence (AI). The most common confusion may be about AI and repetitive tasks. Automation is just computer programming, not AI.

It is Time for Enterprise CIOs to Create a New Breed of Innovation

Jul-24-17. By Neil Kinson

The question is how do retailers and other enterprises with decades (and even centuries) of history defend themselves against expanding tech companies? The standard answer is to embrace the latest technology and orient themselves towards what younger customers want today. Instead corporations have to learn from the competition while leveraging the one advantage they still have: scale.

Innovation is as much about Finding Partners as Building Products

Jul-20-17. By Chandra Gnanasambanda, Michael Uhl

The fact is, going it alone, we believe, is simply not the way to go at all. Collaboration is the essential new secret sauce for startups and industry leaders alike. For true disruption to take hold, old and new must work together, playing to each other’s strengths.

Disruption Never comes from Within

Jul-19-17. By Jorge Barba

Every business misses the future and gets disrupted by an outsider. This happens because the incumbents are stuck in their ways, doing the same thing over and over again and never zoom out to take a look at the macro view.

The 5 Worst Big Data Privacy Risks (and how to guard against them)

Jul-14-17. By Taylor Armerding

There are enormous benefits from Big Data analytics, but also massive potential for exposure that could result in anything from embarrassment to outright discrimination. Here's what to look out for — and how to protect yourself and your employees.

DeepMind has Taught an AI to do Something Quite Remarkable

Jul-11-17. By Tom Ward

Researchers at DeepMind have published a paper illustrating how they are teaching artificially intelligent computer agents to traverse alien environments. While the results are slightly goofy, they represent a major step forward on the path to autonomous AI movement.

Is Innovation Unreasonable?

Jul-11-17. By Jeffrey Phillips

We cannot reject reason when we innovate, in fact we must rely on insight, intelligence, research and reason when we innovate. That's because the only way to encourage people to commit to new ideas is to demonstrate new insights, new needs or new experiences, which are all based on research, insights into unsolved problems or challenges or new technologies. This all appeals to reason - why would I choose an uncertain unknown over a predictable certainty? Only if the unknown is promising, compelling and valuable.

Peering inside an AI's Brain will help us Trust its Decisions

Jul-03-17. By Matt Reyolds

Artificial intelligences don’t make decisions in the same way that humans do. Even the best image recognition algorithms can be tricked into seeing a robin or cheetah in images that are just white noise, for example. It’s a big problem.

The Essential Connection between Strategy and Innovation

Jun-27-17. By Paul Hobcraft

Often it is within the strategies that should be outlined, lies the potential new spaces to play for innovation’s design. Yet how often do we fail to connect the innovation’s we design and execute specifically aligned to the strategic need?

All Disruption is Innovative; Not all Innovation is Disruptive

Jun-27-17. By Doug Collins

The theory of disruptive innovation applies in some circumstances but not others. In mastering the theory, we master the practice. In mastering the practice, we learn how to connect strategy with tactics. The risk of indulging in dogma around theory exists, always. The risk of being rudderless—a death sentence in the Digital Age for firms—is far greater, however.

To Disrupt, or Not to Disrupt

Jun-27-17. By Chris Kalaboukis

Let’s face it – most people just don’t like change. We like things being the way that they are – even the word “upset” has a negative connection – to turn over the “set” to break with the established order. The only problem is – there are so many things we have the ability to just SOLVE, only we would be willing to “upset” things.

Either You Drive Disruption, or You're Outpaced By It

Jun-27-17. By Jorge Barba

The default state of every new idea is no, and every single innovator has to figure out a way to turn that no into a yes. It’s not easy because people are resistant to technology because they’re afraid of losing what they’ve built, what sustains them. This is “the messy part about innovation“, what no one talks about because they opted for an easier path. But the truth is change is messy, and no one is immune to it.

The Benefits of Taking a Slower Approach to Innovation

Jun-26-17. By Sam Ford, Federico Rodriguez Tarditi

In our experience, managers tend to focus their innovation efforts on processes that are either large in scale (new products and business models ) or swift in development (hackathons, rapid prototyping, or emerging platforms). There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, as both approaches can pay huge dividends. But there’s also another type of innovation that is more gradual and smaller in scale. We call it slow innovation.

Google's 9 Principles of Innovation

Jun-23-17. By Cheryl Perkins

Google is one of the most innovative companies in the world, because it actively pursues a culture of innovation. Google for years has worked to ensure that innovative ideas are continually flowing in order to position the company for success well into the future. What is Google doing, and how can we learn from their innovative culture?

Can People be Trained to be Innovators?

Jun-23-17. By Jorge Barba

Ideas are the seeds of innovation, and all people are creative. So, the answer is yes. But it comes with a caveat: Most every organization wants innovation but rejects creativity. Traditionally managed businesses with a short-term, profit maximization mindset are hard-wired to reject innovation.

The 4 Types of Innovation and the Problems They Solve

Jun-21-17. By Greg Satell

We need to start treating innovation like other business disciplines — as a set of tools that are designed to accomplish specific objectives. Just as we wouldn’t rely on a single marketing tactic or a single source of financing for the entire life of an organization, we need to build up a portfolio of innovation strategies designed for specific tasks.

Airbnb's Biggest Weapon Against Hotels: Machine Learning

Jun-20-17. By Sonya Mann

Mike Curtis did reveal that introducing a deep neural net to the search-ranking system boosted Airbnb's recent conversion rate by 1 percent. "One percent may not sound like a lot, but as you can imagine, a 1 percent increase in conversion rate compounds over time," he explained. Curtis doesn't just see Airbnb's use of cutting-edge technology in terms of ROI, but also as a hopeful sign regarding innovation's impact on the future.

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