Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life

Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life

Paddy Miller, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1422144194

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Turn team members into innovators

Most organizations approach innovation as if it were a sideline activity. Every so often employees are sent to “Brainstorm Island”: an off-site replete with trendy lectures, creative workshops, and overenthusiastic facilitators. But once they return, it’s back to business as usual.

Innovation experts Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg suggest a better approach. They recommend that leaders at all levels become “innovation architects,” creating an ecosystem in which people engage in key innovation behaviors as part of their daily work.

In short, this book is about getting to a state of “innovation as usual,” where regular employees—in jobs like finance, marketing, sales, or operations—make innovation happen in a way that’s both systemic and sustainable.

Instead of organizing brainstorming sessions, idea jams, and off-sites that rarely result in success, leaders should guide their people in what the authors call the “5 + 1 keystone behaviors” of innovation: focus, connect, tweak, select, stealthstorm, (and the + 1) persist:

Focus beats freedom: Direct people to look only for ideas that matter to the business
Insight comes from the outside: Urge people to connect to new worlds
First ideas are flawed: Challenge people to tweak and reframe their initial ideas
Most ideas are bad ideas: Guide people to select the best ideas and discard the rest
Stealthstorming rules: Help people navigate the politics of innovation
Creativity is a choice: Motivate everyone to persist in the five keystone behaviors

Using examples from a wide range of companies such as Pfizer, Index Ventures, Lonza, Go Travel, Prehype, DSM, and others, Innovation as Usual lights the way toward embedding creativity in the DNA of the workplace.

So cancel that off-site. Instead, read Innovation as Usual—and put innovation at the core of your business.

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Innovation the NASA Way: Harnessing the Power of Your Organization for Breakthrough Success

Organizational Behavior

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Are systematically exposed to new, external input. No matter how bright people are, if they sit and move in the same worlds every day, getting the same kind of input as everybody else, chances are they won't get original ideas. On the other hand, when people regularly expose themselves to new ideas and places—when they meet new people, spend time with their customers, stay in other countries, are exposed to new industries, experience different cultures, read new books, study new fields, or even.

The actual product, service, or process that people are creating. But, crucially, it is not just the solution that tends to develop. What will also change is the understanding of the problem or need that people aim to address with their innovation. In the most radical cases, both the problem and the solution will mutate so much along the way that the finished innovation will have absolutely nothing to do with the original idea. An oft-cited example is that of PayPal. In 1998, when Max Levchin and.

Cases where the problem does not occur? What is special about these cases? • if any solutions have been attempted in the past, why did these fail? Was it only a matter of poor execution, or did the attempted solution address the wrong problem? • If any new solutions have been proposed, what do these solutions assume about the problem? Is there any evidence that those assumptions are true? Reframing in A c t i o n If your people are unfamiliar with problem-oriented methods, reframing may.

Upper echelons of power, not all corporate superiors share Blane's chilly downward disposition. Once you manage to convince a senior executive to believe in an idea—and notably, in the people who will carry it out—all manner of things political will start to become easier. As mentioned in chapter 1, one such sponsor played a critical role in the creation of pfizerWorks. Initially, Jordan Cohen's primary sponsor was his immediate boss, Bob Orr, who supported Cohen's extracurricular activities and.

Support systems that can help the gatekeepers of your business make better judgment calls. Mark Turrell, CEO of Orcasci and an expert in idea filtering, shared a thought-provoking example from his work within the business unit of a large US auto-parts manufacturer. To find new ways of generating cost savings, the business unit head Turrell worked with had run an internal idea contest, and as an experiment, he decided to divide the resulting ideas into two similar batches and then assign the job.

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