Whenever I give a speech on creativity and innovation in business, I never fail to field some version of this question: “What’s the best way to incentivize people for ideas?” My answer, invariably, is “You don’t. Never ever pay people for ideas. Your current idea flow will stop cold.” Here’s why.
What If They Listened to Entrepreneurs?
There’s a great site that all small business owners and operators should have among their bookmarked favorites: ChangeThis.com. It’s a sister site to 800CEORead.com. What’s so great about ChangeThis.com is that each month they publish a handful of short (1500-3000 words) “manifestos” submitted by high profile individuals such OPEN Forum experts Guy Kawasaki and Scott Belsky. These manifestos are in pdf format, free, AND freely sharable under a Creative Commons License. Frequently, they are an …
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The 5 Habits of Highly Disruptive Innovators
In 2003, three scholars of innovation got together to chat about innovation: Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University’s Marriott School, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, and Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, originator of the phrase “disruptive innovation” in his seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. At the center of the discussion was a single question: “where do disruptive strategies come from?” With that question in mind, the three embarked on an eight-year study to uncover the origins …
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The Innovator’s DNA
Ask any business owner or CEO about their strategic priority list, and “innovation” is likely to be at or very near the top. In fact, a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified “creativity” as the number one leadership competency of the future. One reason for this, arguably, is that in 1997, Harvard Business School scholar Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation,” and wrote two bestsellers on the topic–The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s …
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How to Hold a Design Jam in 53 Minutes
When the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, aka the “d.school,” announced a few weeks ago that they were holding an experimental crash course in design thinking free of charge for the first 200 people to sign up, I immediately signed up. I’m constantly on the lookout for opportunities to learn, hone my skills, and pick up new creativity coaching ideas. I was especially curious to see what could be done within a …
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Creative Workshop
According to Roger Martin, dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School and author of several and articles on design-driven innovation, “businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers, they need to become designers.” That’s a tall order, because designers utilize a specific set of creative skills–observing, ideating, prototyping–to solve wicked problems. But David Sherwin, an award winning Senior Interaction Designer at frog design, has tackled the challenge head-on with a terrific skills-building book entitled Creative Workshop: …
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The Neuroscience of Change, Or How to Reset Your Brain
The mysteries of the mind and brain are many and complex. Neuroscience, through the magic of technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is just beginning to unravel some of them. Given that my livelihood revolves around creativity, I have become fascinated with what’s called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the mind’s ability to change the brain. Yes, you read that right. Neuroplasticity radically reverses ages of scientific dogma which held that mental experiences result only from …
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