Innovation Flow

If you are looking for a simple and effective framework that you can adapt for organizational innovation and for coaching your innovation leaders, then you will find help here. You may be familiar with the framework for leadership that was developed at MIT over a four-year period by Professors   Deborah Ancona ,   Tom Malone , and   Wanda Orlikowski , with Peter Senge , and tested in diverse real world settings, the FCF is a powerful tool for understanding and integrating the four critical components of leadership.  The FCF, as described in research on  Leadership in the Age of Uncertainty , defines these components as follows ( http://mitleadership.mit.edu/r-dlm.php ) Sensemaking:  making sense of the world around us, coming to understand the context in which we are operating. Relating:  developing key relationships within and across organizations. Visioning:  creating a compelling picture of the future. Inventing:  designing new...

I am currently teaching a course on Technology and Innovation Management at the Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore. It is a 2-credit elective course and the class comprises of both Marketing and Finance students (about 60 students). This is the third consecutive year that I am teaching this course - i make it interesting to myself  by preparing fresh charts, case-studies and projects every time. It is a very refreshing experience to design fresh and teach this course every year. I aim to learn from my class as much as I teach. To ensure effective learning, I spend about 25% time to introduce the concepts - the rest 75% time is interactive discussions, hand-on exercises, focused ideation sessions and problem solving workshops. I have taught the first 8 sessions out of a total of 24 sessions as of today. In the first two sessions, we focused on defining innovation management, breaking the Myths and discussing the key issues that make managing innovation d...

There are good parallels between how Panini simplified and made Sanskrit grammar accessible to all and how Altshuller simplified and made the collective wisdom of Inventive knowledge accessible to all. Panini and Altshuller were not contemporaries, they were separated by at least 25 centuries. But their zeal and perseverance to reduce complex stuff into a handful of powerful principles is very much comparable. Their himalayan effort connected the invisible dots and brought out patterns that were submerged in a vast amount of unstructured data.  Panini is a great sanskrit grammarian and logician (~ 4th century BC).  He was a pioneer in Linguistics and his works were path breaking in both descriptive and generative linguistics. He was a forerunner of modern formal language widely used in modern computer languages. Source -  http://ramm.hubpages.com/hub/PANINI-LOGICIAN-AND-SANSKRIT-GRAMMARIAN Genrich Altshuller, the originator of TRIZ, was working in the pat...

My innovation education started many years back when I read that the three essential components of Innovation are Expertise, Creativity and Motivation (I guess it was in an HBR article by Teresa Amabile). This thought has been reiterated by other innovation experts over the years. However , while practising innovation, I had a major challenge in balancing expertise and creativity. In areas where i had significant expertise, I was unable to entertain creative ideas (my left brain rushed to filter out those early stage ideas). In areas where I had no expertise, I could boldly think and come up with many creative ideas - but i had limited success in taking the ideas forward as I had limited domain knowledge and expertise.  If you ask, which is the most important among the three, then you get mixed response. This is primarily because the question is incomplete if you do not specify the context. For instance, between incremental and radical innovation, the role played by these thre...

If you wish to launch an innovative new product in emerging markets, then you should be reading this.  Recently I was invited to speak on "Navigating in Crowded IP Waters" to an audience of practicing intellectual property (IP) professionals at the FICPI World Conference at Melbourne. I wish to share with you some tips on how you can create IP and launch your innovative new product in crowded waters. My simple approach has only two steps - Visualize and Realize - if you do these two steps right then you have mitigated the biggest risk around your new product. The biggest challenge is about navigating in crowded IP waters. Your competitive advantage arises from the innovation that enables your new product.  How do you create an entry barrier to your competition - how do you discourage them from designing around your innovation ? The Intellectual property around the innovative features in your new product need to adequately protected - one way to take care of this is...

A tribute to Stephen Covey Most of us know Steven Covey as the author of the highly acclaimed “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I wish to draw your attention to the book that he wrote on   the 8 th  Habit which is all about “finding your voice” and helping others find theirs.  In this context “voice” is the unique personal significance that each person offers and can bring to bear at work. To find your voice, you must connect with mind, body, heart and spirit. He defines leadership as the ability to help others understand their own true worth and potential so that they see it in themselves and live accordingly.  This book resonated with me because I believe as Innovation leaders we have the potential to make an enormous difference in the lives of the people we work with. The "voice" that we need to find is creativity and innovation. We need to find our Innovation potential and helps others to find it.  Each person has creativity latent...