Overview: Innovation Strategy

If you're involved in developing strategy, you need to read 'Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy'. Personally I recognise a lot of this, including in myself, although I don't consider myself particularly smart. The key recommendation? "strategy should not be a monoculture ... of high-IQ analytical wizards. Great strategy is aided by diver…

Excellent intro to @buffer team's toolkit. Many I'll definitely check out, particularly Sqwiggle "... a video chat tool that helps you stay in touch with your team when you're working remotely. Every few seconds, Sqwiggle takes a screenshot of you so your colleagues can see that you're around, and just by clicking on another person you can join a …

"Employees don't want to be "satisfied" as much as they want to be engaged. What they want most is a great boss who cares about their development, and a company that focuses on and develops their strengths." - Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter | LinkedIn

"Internal communications are responsible for engagement, which can enable employees to actively play a part in shaping the values and the type of experience customers have. Engaged employees who have been inspired and experience the vision, values and mission will then be strong advocates as they work and become involved in the brand themselves…

"if you co-create with your consumers, you are more likely to develop something that they want to buy; consumers are far more likely to be advocates and ambassadors for something that they have had a say in developing; the very act of engaging in a process of co-creation will increase consumer loyalty to your brand. Swap the word "employees" fo…

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

couple of good questions here: "2. What services do we need to provide our clients in order to increase revenues 10 times from our top 25 clients? Package and price multiple services from all service categories ... have upfront conversations with clients allowing them to select services from a menu of items. ... 3. How do we improve retention a…

"there are themes that may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.... ... report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged audience," ... While this is a central role for the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual... ... another important …

"it is the innovation report which needs to be read cover to cover by anyone whose work includes a digital media component. "

The bandwagon effect about the plague of social media experts seems to be coming to a close, at least in corporate USA

Brian Solis on LinkedIn: "a pattern of best practices ... these pillars represent the cultural capstones that the most innovative companies in the world invest in to stay ahead of the curve." - How to Build a Culture of Innovation Pt. 2: The 12 Pillars of Innovation | LinkedIn

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Na…

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…

Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…

"Performance reviews that are tied to compensation create a blame-oriented culture. It’s well known that they reinforce hierarchy, undermine collegiality, work against cooperative problem solving, discourage straight talk, and too easily become politicized. They’re self-defeating and demoralizing for all concerned. Even high performers suffer, bec…

"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…

Innovation loves diversity. Europe's diverse. Why isn't Europe innovative? "teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do. When a diverse range of experts interact... the solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innova…

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

The focus here is on business, but why not government? "By using communities, businesses can look beyond their four walls to access a global talent pool ... Communities allow businesses to accelerate and scale innovation by widening the funnel of what they can evaluate, by filling in missing skills and talent, and flattening the distance between …

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

"If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pu…

Apart from the obvious platitudes ... "If Open Innovation is not seen as a long term capability building exercise then it will fail.... The NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a big barrier and should never be underestimated." ... there's some interesting case studies in here - e.g.,: through "TechnoWeb, our internal social media tool, we …

The forward of this book, by Brian Solis, made me want to substitute 'citizen' for 'consumer' and 'customer', and 'government' for 'business': "The future of customer engagement requires a more thoughtful and localized approach. Connected customers aren’t complacent, fickle or unfaithful, they’re focused on what’s important to them. As they’re al…

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

"‘social desking’, where personal workspaces are geared to co-work as well as solitary work. This involves rethinking the office as a shared space, that should be organized around something other than optimizing square meters per employees. Ultimately, it has to be judged by productivity and worker engagement. And the tricky part is not space, but…

"Innovation is challenging because to innovate we must seek out uncertainty. For most people, this isn't comfortable - that's why we don't like "this might not work." Nevertheless, if we want to do work that makes a difference, that's where we need to be. To grow we have to try, stumble, and learn."

"Innovation is the process of idea management - so, yes, you need great ideas to innovate, but that is only part of it. You also need to be able to select ideas. Once you've done that, you need the ability to execute them. While all this is going on, you have to keep people inside your organization enthusiastic about the ideas. And at the end …

Great article on Medium. Best part comes at the end: "This week we launched an initiative that aims to ease the conflict between these opposing forces. Each of our team members gets to study a subject of their choice over the period of a year. It's a long term study initiative that resembles a PhD. Think of it more like a thesis than project wo…