SOLVING THE TOUGHEST MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES—TOGETHER GET STARTED
Submitted Ideas
Innovation has to go beyond products and technology!
Does it matter that you have the best product or technology if this does not provide the best OVERALL solution to the customer? No, it does not help much.
Innovation often fails because there is too much focus on the product or technology aspect of innovation. We need a more holistic approach to innovation; an approach that not only focuses on products and technologies, but also on services and processes.
For this to happen, training and education across the organization is key.
Multiply the sources of funding for new initiatives
In most organizations, the only way to get funding for cool new ideas is up the chain of command (good luck if your boss doesn't like your plan). What would Silicon Valley look like if it operated with one giant VC? (hint: think Soviet Union)
Here's a different approach: give all employees the permission to invest 5% of their budget in any project they see promising. This would allow "intrapreneurs" to be matched with many potential angel investors.
Show Don't Tell
We can spend all kinds of time in meetings showing power points to explain how great our innovation process is and convincing our leaders of the need to drive more of it. Finding opportunities to showcase the insights, the prototypes, the way things manifest in real life, with the passionate innovators presenting them goes a long way when it comes to driving inspiration and behavior. Innovators must find and produce these opportunities to create internal "demand" for innovation.
Parallel: A MMORPG designed for accelerating innovation
World of Warcraft have reached recently 12 millions users. Imagine that you'd have all this people working or should I say gaming to create and imagine innovative ideas ? People playing MMORPG are usally creative, passionate and skilled, good skills to innovate. So why not building a MMORPG occuring in a parallel virtual world in which the gamers could take the ownership of their avatars to create their own quest (innovative ideas). Moreover real project could be backtest in this parallel market
Defeat a "tear things down" culture
Linus Pauling said "If you want to have good ideas you must have *many* ideas." Yet in many organizations, the good ideas never surface because people are worried they may have to defend them from criticism or attack while still not fully developed. Protect the idea generators by challenging those who tear ideas down. New rule: if someone doesn't like an idea, rather than attack the idea itself, they must instead suggest a better one so that the organization is always building, not tearing down.
Truly flatten the organization
As Clay Shirky has pointed out, technology has dramatically lowered the cost of coordinated action, and formal, command-and-control organizational structures from the industrial era are frequently unnecessary, if not counterproductive . Removing hierarchical friction and empowering all parts of the organization to participate in innovation would have an immediate and substantial impact on innovation-friendliness. Truly flatten the corporate organization; don't just talk about it.
Put the experiments and trials score-board out of the game until the game really start.
Many times our organizational processes don't give us enough chances to fail and improve because they bring the score-board in the game even in the practice session. Everything we do is considered and measured into total efficiency matrix. All our trials and given time are considered as the chances given to us to prove our self. As the trials are meant to be failed on large basis they hand-cuff, discard the creative people with red and yellow card that you haven't shown the tangible results.
Replace all mission and vision statements with: "We are here to improve life!"
Most people want to get home after a hard days work and tell their family they did something important. Proud people engage their minds, hearts and hands into creating something bigger than them. Organizations were created to make life better. Let's reinstate that purpose, including all the planet and not only human beings. CEOs should say "We're not here to make cars, refrigerators, shampoo. We're here to improve life. Let's use our knowledge, machinery and network. Dream and prototype!"
Re-shore manufacturing with our advanced VizPlanet/VizPlant platform, with a “global reach & yet with a local presence”!
With so much rhetoric being thrown these days, to onshore manufacturing, we suggest an advanced, win: win value proposition, to re-shore it, with a “global reach & yet with a local presence”, using our VizPlanet/VizPlant platform, that is designed, by combining physical devices with digital telemetry, to enable certain repetitive functions, to be remotely operated by global resources (without off-shoring the full plant), saving substantial non strategic cost. Plz read my VizPlanet hack for more.
Minimize the cost of experimentation
A company can't explore a lot of new options if it costs millions of dollars (or even thousands) to test each one. To make innovation a capability, an organization must master the art of rapid prototyping. It must maximize the ratio of learning over investment to find the sweet spot of demand for a new product, or perfect a nascent business more rapidly an inexpensively than competitors.
Add More Military Leaders to Executive Ranks
Former military leaders develop some of the best innovation-friendly cultures. They have the intuition, humility, fierce fairness and resolve for coaxing employees towards being creative and reaching their full potential. They use a blend of inspiration, support and opportunity-alignment in a way that ensures success.They are the truly fearless leaders, awesome advocates and great mentors required by employees today to achieve the massive change initiatives organizations are undertaking.
Give Everyone a Voice
Organizations create innovation walls. If you’re in an organization, you’re in the club and you have a voice into what it creates. However, if you’re outside the org, you are often separated by the wall of “not created here”. You can shout your voice from afar and sometimes you’re heard. You can ask club members to carry your voice through the wall and sometimes they do. Often there is silence in return. And innovation goes wanting. Give everyone a voice: lower the wall and then really listen…
Redefine Innovation: Make innovation easy, simple, interesting and fun activity for everybody.
If you ask experts, thinkers, gurus and real innovators what is innovation, you will get the answers that reflect Doing and Thinking different,Think Outside the Box,Cultivating new skills,Detail focus to customers etc.The definition of innovation build perception in people as you have to be God Gifted,Genius,Constantly learning,Practicing hard. These things demotivate many people to believe that are not much innovative or this is not my cup of tea and lost their creative confidence.
Make Collaboration, the cornerstone of Competitive Advantage Culture!
While Strategy is all about creating value, most companies end up competing for the same set of value slices, as opposed to, increasing the size of the value pie. Simply put, when the size of the value pie is enlarged, it is no longer a zero sum game, and so, companies are still motivated to play together, in a collaborative fashion. How? Make collaboration, the cornerstone of company's culture, by combining virtual & physical resources, as outlined in my “Innovating Innovation hack”.