* Focus on Incremental Innovations. These can be easier and more cost-effective to discover and implement than their bigger, grander, sibling: the disruptive, blue-ocean, innovation.
Note: they're still disruptive. But the disruptions are scaled more for ripples of change, not tidal waves.
* Prepare for the Flood. There's a pentup supply of ideas (and emotions) on how to fix, improve and solve our challenges. Just ask and wait for the floodgates to open and ideas to come spilling forth. Be ready with tools and processes to not only welcome the ideas, but absorb them in a way that maximizes their value. Remember: once you open these floodgates, they won't be closed afterwards.
* Diversity, diversity, diversity. That should describe the makeup of your teams. Include representatives from all the functional areas of your business: sales, marketing, IT, customer service, accounting, operations, shipping, collections...Diversity in thoughts and ideas and backgrounds and skills and values is the key to generating innovative solutions.
Innovation Tools blog post, 3 Common Innovation Traps, inspired this post.
The middle point, Prepare for the Flood, was a point I discovered as I led innovation at a small company. The firehose of input that was turned on was a surprise, a pleasant surprise but still a surprise. One of the best tools to manage the volume of ideas and their discussions was Basecamp. I highly recommend you use Basecamp to manage your innovation process.
Note: they're still disruptive. But the disruptions are scaled more for ripples of change, not tidal waves.
* Prepare for the Flood. There's a pentup supply of ideas (and emotions) on how to fix, improve and solve our challenges. Just ask and wait for the floodgates to open and ideas to come spilling forth. Be ready with tools and processes to not only welcome the ideas, but absorb them in a way that maximizes their value. Remember: once you open these floodgates, they won't be closed afterwards.
* Diversity, diversity, diversity. That should describe the makeup of your teams. Include representatives from all the functional areas of your business: sales, marketing, IT, customer service, accounting, operations, shipping, collections...Diversity in thoughts and ideas and backgrounds and skills and values is the key to generating innovative solutions.
Innovation Tools blog post, 3 Common Innovation Traps, inspired this post.
The middle point, Prepare for the Flood, was a point I discovered as I led innovation at a small company. The firehose of input that was turned on was a surprise, a pleasant surprise but still a surprise. One of the best tools to manage the volume of ideas and their discussions was Basecamp. I highly recommend you use Basecamp to manage your innovation process.
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