Overview: Innovation Strategy

Sets out "... the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use... how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people's long-term adoption of an innovation." and, for good measure, sets out the implications for design teams of each characteristic, because "Design teams can address many components of thes…

"In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg... focus on hiring, developing and empowering "smart creatives"-professionals with the technical skills to solve problems as well as the imagination to dream up new ideas. ... while senior executives strategize and plan, those plans always fall short. "Since the plan is wrong, the peopl…

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

Over on Medium, a terrific piece taking apart how bad most hiring processes are, and exploring one experiment with fixing it: hiring hackathons. The actual results were mixed - it was a pilot, after all - but the idea definitely deserves traction for a company like Intrasoft."

Of them all, I particularly like the look of Write Or Die, Wridea & StayFocused, which possibly says more about me than my 5 latest blog posts combined: "These tools will not only provide you with a way to write down your ideas whenever they hit you, but will also enable you to organize your time better and start writing more content through a re…

"Taster is a place for the BBC to try new ways of telling stories, develop new talent, and put new technology through its paces. It also allows the BBC to showcase a range of editorial and technology projects that may have previously remained behind closed doors... Enables the BBC to ... innovating quickly, gaining valuable feedback and respond…

"the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.... in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks..." How our mobile-phone-driven flight away from idletime and interiority damages our psychology, physical…

Interesting ruminations on the limits of traditional knowledge mgt techniques. "the everyday experiences we have do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions or the Word-documents explaining what we did or what we should have done." - Wh…

"The Five Whys technique was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training... "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." ... dig into each problem that arose until they found the root cause. "Observe the production floor w…

A timely and interesting article... "Gossip is an effective way of achieving these goals in an unhealthy social system. People engage in gossip when they lack trust or efficacy. We become consumers of gossip when we don’t trust formal channels... We become purveyors of it when we feel we can’t raise sensitive issues more directly... The problem w…

"The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data... often focuses on images... our instincts about privacy must change now that machines can decipher images." - Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence from 2014 | MIT Technology Review

Fairly typical piece on integrating social media into organisations to improve customer service, employee productivity and sales. These points have been made before, but this article brings them together well and provides plenty of links to the underlying research, which makes it useful if you need to supporting arguments for change management. -…

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

"Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations ... create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost... we have gleaned five valuab…

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…

"we’ve applied econometric principles to the results of over 200 intranet surveys and… statistically pinpointed which intranet attributes most impact a user’s perception of their intranet. This first post... showing what employees prefer to look and find when they view their company’s intranet." Some surprising results, For example, although I'…

"businesses ... can, without realizing it, generate an environment hostile to innovation... frontline business units... are optimized to relatively short-term goals that are anchored in what they are currently doing or selling rather than in what they could be doing differently. As a result, line managers instinctively reject innovations that won…

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…

Interesting description of the benefits of being a 'fast follower' by The Economist's Paul Rossi: "instilling a culture across the business where staff are keeping an eye on what's going on ...the editorial side [is] ... actively talking to people about new technologies. How to deliver content, how to deliver video... on the commercial team everbo…

"“Yes, and…” is the closest thing improv comedy has to a cardinal rule. The rule goes like this: When the first performer says something, the next performer has to say “Yes, and…” instead of negating or dropping what the first performer said. It’s a powerful rule because it allows a comedy scene to go in unexpected, delightful directions... Insid…

"Expanding on the “good ideas that look like bad ideas” concept ... what does it take for large companies to innovate? " - How Can Large Companies Innovate? | Andreessen Horowitz

(Editor's note: Ms Swift is apparently a pop star) "The most successful businesses today are movements more than companies. Movements don't market. Movements inspire and engage. They create an emotional connection through storytelling. Not stories to be enjoyed passively but stories we see ourselves in, stories we can actively participate in...…

"movements... seem to self-organize and spread virally, as if they were LOLCats or some other digital meme. So why can’t we get our organizations to act the same way? You would think that with command and incentive structures in place, it would be easier for leaders to set a direction and get things moving, but anyone who’s run an enterprise kno…

Tackling corporate memory loss and innovation failure requires a different paradigm than that offered by social media.

The basic reasons we launched I-Labs are all here: "The most powerful way of learning is ...  to have conversation... the best examples of great insight nearly always come from cases where people shared knowledge or experience.... every organisation is sitting on a wealth of information that potentially contains insight... This information is ly…

"Traditional intranets required someone at the helm with a broad perspective and variety of skills. Newer social intranets, with their greater ability to influence company culture and productivity, have only added to the pile of needed skills. In this article we explain what the core skills are for successful intranet managers, common gaps in exp…

"Ideas represent possibilities for alternate futures. But, ideas are a commodity ... concepts until they’re brought to life. And that takes ... courage, passion, and resilience... Ideapod creates a creative community where people and ideas come together. And by together, I mean we invest in and build an active community where ideas and engagemen…