Category: Innovation

Ideas, Innovation

The Power of Framing

If you were offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, what would you prefer? This is the exact question that was asked in a psychological experiment, which has been repeated multiple times by different experimenters and it looks like most of the people who participate in the experiment tend to choose option 1, i.e., $5 today over the $10 in a month. This proved to the experimenters the existence of a bias that we tend to value short term rewards more than long term rewards, also called “temporal discounting”. When the same question was reframed as “Would you prefer […]

Innovation

Shifting Focus of Innovation – From Efficiency to Effectiveness

The past couple of decades all innovation efforts and application of technology has been in an effort to increase the efficiency of people working in organisations. This could be done by automation and helping people work more productively, still working on what they were already working on. I believe that the future application of technology and human ingenuity would be to increase the effectiveness of people and machines. This will mean that we are looking at complete rethinking and redesign of processes and how work is done and even what work is done. New technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, […]

1000Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Why Do Startups Fail?

Premise: There has been enough written about startups and reasons why almost all of them fail. So, why write another post about this? Even though there is no dearth of resources (blogs, videos, books, stories, etc) on reasons why startups fail and how to avoid them, I don’t see any reduction in the failure rates of startups; I don’t see them learning from the mistakes of other failed startups; I don’t see them focus on the right things that can help them avoid failure. It is crucial that we understand that building a startup is not like a chemical reaction […]

Ideas, Innovation

Boredom and Creative Breakthroughs

In this short animation, Dr. Sandi Mann talks about why boredom is an important emotion for us and what role it plays in the creative process. Boredom creates a space where we can daydream and allow our sub-conscious mind to connect unrelated things and these connections lead to new insights and creative ideas. If we really want to experience creative breakthroughs, avoiding boredom is not an option. Enjoy the video!   I have written earlier about this as well. You can read that post here.  

Ideas, Innovation

Why Good Ideas Don’t Fly and What To Do About It?

Every leader talks about the importance of innovation to their business. In public, every leader talks about how they and their teams are at the fore front of innovation. In private, the very same leaders confess that they are nowhere near the level of innovation that they would like to be at.  On one hand, they confess that they are struggling to get the innovation process work as effectively as any of their other functions. On the other hand, there are good ideas that languish within their corporate boundaries with no support. This seems to be a dichotomy that needs […]