Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Becoming More Innovative in 2015: Innovation Resolutions
Since it’s not typical that anyone follows through on their resolutions to journal more, lose twenty pounds, or drink less coffee, 2015 might just be the year to focus your motivational efforts on the business front. After all, every company needs innovation, so why not give it some serious attention this year? From Forbes:
“What are you going to do this coming year to be more innovative? Innovative organizations deserve innovative leaders and members and if you’re not consciously thinking about how you might improve your own personal innovativeness, you’re abdicating on an important managerial responsibility.
Since this is the time for New Year’s resolutions, once again in the belief that organizations don’t innovate, people do, I have asked a group of highly innovative individuals who I admire to think aloud with the rest of us about how they will endeavor to become even more innovative in the upcoming year.”
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The Key to Increased Productivity? Stop Working
Don’t be fooled by the title — the author here is not saying to up and quit your day job in the name of productivity. Rather, this admonition is more about learning from failures and successes, being thoughtful about everyday best practices, and making sure you ask important, strategic questions about what is and isn’t working — before abandoning processes or instituting new tools. From Inc.:
“What’s going right? Correctly answering that question can help you determine where to focus your efforts in the near future.
Any business analyst (or ‘Shark Tank’ aficionado) can tell you: Trying to do too much, too soon is business suicide. It’s not just start-ups; in 1998 LEGO suffered its first loss in company history. Why? Too much innovation. Wharton professor David Roberston, who studied the company for years and even wrote a book on the topic, reports that LEGO tried to keep their growth going by tripling the number of new toys that it offered between 1993 and 1998, but sales didn’t go anywhere.
How did they get back to form? A return to the core values of the company.”
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Improvisational Innovation: How to Tap Your Team for the Next Big Idea
Hear, hear! Improvisational innovation is a somewhat uncommon term, but the values behind it are very similar to collaborative ideation and crowdsourcing — practices that we not only support, but staunchly believe can be the crucial difference between sailing forward towards success and missing the boat entirely. From VentureBeat:
“Democratize the ideation platform so that great ideas can bubble up from anyone at any time.
Inventors are currently defined and determined by the industry they are in. In big Pharma, for example, while innovation is market-driven, it is scientists who become the innovators. In software or SaaS (software-as-a-service), it is the CTO and the engineering team. In fashion, it is designers, and so on. In the innovation capital of the world, Silicon Valley, there is an adopted belief that every person is responsible for the success and failure of an organization. If other organizations adopted this same mindset, then it would allow for broader participation in the invention process. The powerful difference in improvisational innovation is that inspiration can come from everyone, in every role, in every corner of the company. However, in order to effectively democratize the ideation process, there has to be a standard of humility when one shares their ideas, and an environment of optimism must exist so that anyone feels encouraged to propel their idea forward.”
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