Tag: 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

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 […]

Innovation

4 Pathways to Innovation

I was facilitating a group of senior leaders who were tasked with leading the innovation effort in their respective organization and started the facilitation with the simple yet profound question – “How do you define innovation?”. The best answer I’ve so far received to this question is the following: “Innovation is applied problem solving leading to generation of value.” The next question to ask then is the following: “Which problems are worth solving and where do we find them?” This is the first step in the innovation process. If we don’t pick the right problems, no matter how interesting our […]

1000Entrepreneurs, Ideas, Innovation

Big Data, Automation and Cows Who Decide When they want to be Milked

I came across this interesting read on Quartz.com. The post is about a farm in Iceland where the entire barn is automated. Here are some quotes from the article. When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes […]