Idea and Innovation Blog

Earlier this week, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal reached out to us for some information about innovation and idea management. It’s not every day that a reporter reaches out to you for information, so naturally we were flattered.The article, titled “For Bright Ideas, Ask the Sta...

Wow!! Innovation is just about on everybody’s lips theses days. It’s a buzzword, a movement and a panacea to all corporate malaise. “I’ve got it Smithers, we will transform ourselves into a lean, mean, innovation machine”!!! Okay Chief, now what? Well in the real worl...

Some companies get it and others just don’t. Word-of-mouth promotion of one’s brands, activities and innovation initiatives is one of the most powerful, motivational and effective tool in a company’s arsenal. It’s viral, cost-effective and credible. So how does one build the...

Innovation as a sustainable and viral process is proving more elusive for some than first envisioned. It is becoming apparent to newer practitioners that certain key elements need to be omnipresent for the goodness to not only happen, but to last. Unless you change your entire organization overnigh...

The other day, I was having some cookies with my daughters and as it so happens, I had a moment of reckoning. We have an arrangement whereby we each twist one end of an Oreo off and exchange for the portions that we want: they want the ends with the icing and I get the cookie part only sans all tha...

As things go, there is a certain status that comes with size. Scale it seems is the street cred that makes the good..great; the known...ubiquitous; the powerful...mighty. And because folks immersed in innovation are  as susceptible as any to this seek out this revered status, the temptations is...

Like many other people out there, I have been spending some time in chat rooms, forums and LinkedIn groups regarding innovation. There are thought-provoking concepts and theories regarding this or that; many opinions, tack-tics and strategies, book recommendations – myriad advice-givers and a...

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 ...

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...

  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...