Posts by Jeffrey Phillips
You Cannot Survive Doing More of the Same
It seems so funny, looking back on a meeting I attended about 20 years ago. At that meeting a good friend was presenting a new book, entitled Who Moved My Cheese? He was recommending this book to all of us in the leadership team of a mid-sized ERP consulting firm. Of course most of us…
Read MoreInnovation is the Triumph of Hope over Experience
Oscar Wilde, perhaps one of the most acerbic and humorous writers of the 19th century, once commented that a second marriage after a failed first marriage was the “triumph of hope over experience”. His point was that people continued to pursue marriage, even in the face of bitter previous failure. Now Wilde was a bachelor,…
Read MoreChanging Corporate Culture to Encourage More Innovation
I’ve written and spoken about the importance of corporate culture and its impact on innovation over the last 15 years or so. Heck, one of the underlying issues I address in my book Relentless Innovation (shameless plug) is the overwhelming challenge that corporate culture presents to an innovation team. I’ve argued that corporate culture, more than…
Read MoreWhy Context Matters in Successful Innovation
In order to accelerate the pace of innovation and increase the amount of innovation that’s done, we need to simplify it, or at least remove some of the uncertainty. To do that I’m going to argue in this relatively short post that innovation has three important deliverables:
Read More3 Innovation Types: Evolution, Preventative, Creative
We’ve positioned innovation incorrectly. Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers are ready to demand new products and services. We’ve positioned innovation as something to do to prepare for future business, future needs and future demands. Yet, innovation does answer these issues…
Read MoreLego’s Innovation Lessons
In strange and disappointing news, Lego announced that it was facing dire sales projections, with growth slowing from over 25% per year to low single digits. Strange, when just a few years ago Lego was on top of the world, with great new toys, Lego kits, Lego Robots and the Lego movies.
Read MoreYou Lack Allocation and Purpose, Not Time to Innovate
What if everyone in your company had to account for their time, and what if everyone had a specific time allocation for innovation? That might differ depending on the individual, their experience and interest in innovation of course, but what if at the end of each year you could look across your team and see how much time an individual spent building innovation skills and contributing to innovation projects. Wouldn’t that be valuable as a manager?
Read MoreIs Innovation Unreasonable?
Just yesterday while perusing the Twitter stream I saw a quote attributed to Jonathan Ive that made me want to sit up and scream. The quote was relatively straightforward and seems innocuous on its face…
Read MoreWhat Accelerates Innovation?
Universities, businesses and even cities and regions are talking about innovation and the need to create accelerators or innovation enablers. To accelerate innovation, we need to do a couple of important things that are being overlooked or ignored.
Read MoreA Lasting Competitive Advantage: Innovation + Creativity
Will we prepare our children to compete in a world where creativity and divergent thinking become more important than rote memorization? Can we rethink our business structures and processes to embrace more divergence and creativity?
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