Innovation
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Lessons in Rapid Experiments and Learning from Failure
In 1943, the U.S. Airforce met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to express their need for a fighter plane to counter a rapidly growing Nazi jet threat. Because of the need for secrecy “Skunk Works”, as it became known, was allowed… Continue reading
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Using Weak Signals To Determine Your Future Organisation
“Weak signals consist of emergent changes to technology, culture, markets, the economy, consumer tastes and behaviour, and demographics. Weak signals are hard to evaluate because they are incomplete, unsettled and unclear” – Vijay Govindarajan. Luckily for us the future doesn’t… Continue reading
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Why You Need To Selectively Forget Your Own Past
Reset All Assumptions We must selectively forget the past. That means not accepting current practices but challenging underlying assumptions, our solutions and mindsets, and the way we tackle the problem. We need services designed as people need them – not as we… Continue reading
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Bending The Rules To Drive Frugal Innovation
The frugal innovation revolution, by making the means to innovate more widely available, has the potential to speed up the innovation process – Jaideep Prabhu Jugaad is a Hindi word that roughly means ‘solution born from cleverness.’ It’s usually applied to… Continue reading
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To Boost Innovation We Need To Make Ourselves Obsolete
If you’re of a certain age you’ll sometimes find yourself reminiscing about an age where things were built to last. My own mother swears her first washing machine lasted for over 20 years. Today, Apple expects the lifecycle for an average… Continue reading
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How To Kill Creativity (And How To Rebuild It)
Many of our organisations , without realising it , act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place — often for very good reasons — that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms — ‘the way we do things… Continue reading
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We Need Less Talk of Innovation and More Evidence of Impact
In my last post I looked at why change fails and how most corporate programmes are destined for failure. Year on year, huge resources are invested in them. Yet we somehow hope for a different outcome. The biggest reason change… Continue reading
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Why Change Fails: Four Ways To Hack Your Culture
All over the the world our organisations are experiencing profound change. The most common way to react to that is the corporate change programme. Every year businesses will embark on a series of reports , meetings, visioning sessions , training… Continue reading
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Nine Things On Customer Experience And Innovation From Indonesia
I have a thing for travel. For me it’s as much about productivity as pleasure. I operate best in the four weeks before I go on leave and the four weeks on returning. In an ideal world I’d have a break… Continue reading
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We need to encourage organisations to seek risk – and forgive failure
“I’ve focused on the idea of failure being the engine for innovation. Not being afraid of failure but seeing it as a learning opportunity, and the value of getting out into the world and testing things earlier rather than later.”… Continue reading
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12 Months of Failure: Lessons Learned in Year One of Bromford Lab
Guest post by Tom Hartland One year ago the Bromford Lab was established as a way of accelerating new ideas, driving innovation in the business and building our external networks. ‘Failing fast’ was a founding principle, any idea was a… Continue reading
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Lessons From a Year Spent on a Two Pizza Team
Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team – Steve Wozniak In the early years of Amazon , as the… Continue reading
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Three Ways Organisations Kill Ideas (And How You Can Remove Them)
Many organisations , without realising it , act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place – often for very good reasons – that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms – ‘the way we… Continue reading
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How to Make Innovation Part of Everyone’s Job
The average colleague has seven ideas per day about how they could improve where they work. For our company that’s 9000 ideas per day. Or 3 million every year. But most of those ideas never catch fire. – Bromford Lab Tokyo,… Continue reading
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Best Practice, Benchmarking and the Race to Mediocrity
We must be different. We must be lopsided. No more herdlike regression toward the mean – we must find the things at which we’re great, and build on those – Tim Kastelle A few years ago my organisation adopted a new way of… Continue reading
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How To Get Better At Failing
“Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.” Neil Gaiman Just before Christmas – in my final catch up of the year with my manager – a pretty significant thing happened. I was told that… Continue reading
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10 things we learned from launching an Innovation Lab
“If you are going to take an innovation job, make sure to buy yourself some time, and then, use that time to make sure you make a difference.” Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg It’s now over six months since we launched Bromford Lab. I’ve… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 