I recently blogged about Idea Management Systems, noting some of the key issues in the design and implementation of Idea Management Systems. These points and the central importance of a well designed Idea Management Systems are reinforced in a recent Business Week article by Jeneanne Rae, which suggests that: In the annals of corporate innovation…
A Price Waterhouse Coopers Innovation Survey of the “most senior people in the Times Top 1000 companies” found that the top performing 20% of companies responding collected and turned ideas into action through “well defined idea management processes” (an Idea Management System) that seek and gather ideas and knowledge widely from customers, suppliers, employees, other…
Quality is often described in project management methodologies such as PRINCE2 as conformance of a project deliverable with predefined customer acceptance criteria. This is not how I naturally think of Quality. I think of a Quality product as a product that is well designed, with the needs of its target users and markets carefully considered,…
An organisation I have been consulting with recently has been considering the question of to what extent communities of practice should be aligned with organisational goals and structure, and to what extent they have to be free to ‘do their own thing’. What level of accountability should the activities of a community of practice have…
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There is now quite a high level of awareness in corporate life around the types of innovation and how to acheive business value from innovation. This high level of awareness has been brought home strongly in IBM’s recent Global CEO Study on Innovation, a global survey involving 765 CEOs sharing their views on innovation. The…
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Booze Allen Hamilton’s second annual report on the returns from the world’s 1000 largest R&D budgets reinforces the finding from the 2005 report: that there is no simple or direct correlation between the R&D budget and the business value delivered by innovation. The 2006 report identifies a group of 94 “high leverage innovators” that consistently…
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One of the hottest approaches to creativity and innovation in business right now is the design approach. In the United States, D-schools (design schools) such as the Stanford Design School are springing up in competion with (or complementing) traditional B-schools (business schools). The basic idea of the design approach is to (i) understand the client…
I was browsing over at the Social Networking site LinkedIn.com (I’m at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauchlanmackinnon) , and someone was asking about starting up a company. What do you do? The advice I give is: First, select one of the two following models – 1. A Startup. You have a business plan, a clear business model, and sufficient…
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