Idea and Innovation Blog

Ask anyone about their organization and they’ll tell you that they’re different – fair enough and true enough. This raises an interesting question: if being different is so important that it bears mentioning, why then should any company want to emulate the innovation processes of ...

Innovation is a process that spawns newness in the forms of products, services, efficiencies and a host of other improvements; but the process also creates instances for opportunities. As a process, rigor is essential for proper functioning and flexibility vital for sustainability. The latter is key...

Every now and again, we like to use simple everyday situations to illustrate how easy Innovation and Idea Management can be. In the latest installation of this theme, I will share a simple example of collaboration and its ripple effects across a seemingly complex, diverse and siloed environment. L...

There is a healthy debate regarding the benefits of automating the innovation workflow process versus routing ideas manually. From our perspective, both sides are right. Because we would be loathe to create more ambiguity about this thorny subject, let us outline why a workflow strategy designed ar...

People regularly ask me about the benefits of automating Innovation Management. Many don’t just ask, but argue that Innovation Management “must” be automated. How can you automatically create value? Is there more financial value to a sculpture that was hand-crafted by an artist...

As a company, have you ever wondered what you clients are thinking? As a company, are you even sure that clients *like* your products? Two very simple questions, simple *if* you actually ask. For the last few years one could swear that companies don’t ask these questions anymore. How many t...

  One of the most misunderstood concepts regarding innovation management is the Idea Processing Workflow. First, what is a workflow? Here is a definition from Wikipedia: “A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable s...

A subject of intense debates during client implementation sessions is the need for setting up the Idea Classifiers to feed a workflow. Idea Classifiers are relatively important as they enable us to see an idea’s “area(s) of effect(s)” or “area(s) of benefit(s)”. It mak...

A few weeks back, Andre blogged about correlating everyday activities to innovation processes; well here we go again. Have you ever noticed how workflows and public transit system are so similar? You rarely have a direct path from origin to destination. When you reach a stop you wait. You get on an...

It is exciting to see the rate at which innovation activities are being initiated. It is equally amazing to see how many of these forays are steeped in buzz versus idea progression. It would appear that people like to avoid the meaningful work around innovation processes and process innovation in fa...