Category: Innovation

Innovation

You Can’t Innovate when

You don’t know what problem you are solving, and for whom You want the innovation project to go strictly according to plan You don’t have a team which is diverse and engaged You don’t use an innovation framework (any framework would do) The team is not given the tools, training, time and a teacher You’re afraid to make a mistake You’re responsible to innovate but never have the authority (budgets or access) needed to innovate There is no significant insight that is driving the project The team is afraid of calling out if and when “the emperor is naked” There […]

Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

Why Some Ideas Never Get Heard!

Premise: I have been reading and writing about ideas and how ideas spread and the role they play in innovation. However, there was a question that almost always bothered me – Why some ideas, despite being great ideas, never got the traction they deserved, both within an organisation and in the marketplace. The answer to this question was provided by Nilofer Merchant in her TEDx talk that she shared on her blog. If this is a topic of interest for you, i would strongly recommend that you start following her blog and the work that she does. Here is the […]

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 […]