Tag: innovation
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Turning Constraints Into Innovation Opportunities
As we enter a further period of economic uncertainty we will undoubtedly see a slash and burn approach to cost reduction in many of our organisation’s. An impending crisis often triggers suboptimal decision making that tends to focus on survival and forgets about investing in the future. Talent is lost only to be re-recruited again […]
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When Leaders Talk About Innovation, Always Be Sceptical
Declare yourself an innovation company and celebrate creativity, by all means. Then treat your employees to a little seminar in business history that emphasizes real-life time frames and the numbing necessity of trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. Sir Harold Evans In turbulent times beware the leader touting innovation myths. Myths like: […]
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Society Has Digital Transformed, But It Isn’t Evenly Distributed
We often blame innovations for the way they make our lives faster, busier, more intrusive, but in reality our core human behaviours and beliefs are slow to change. Marchetti’s constant, named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the principle that humans settled on a 30 minute commute time to work long ago, and no matter […]
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How Do You Solve A Problem Like The NHS?
There comes a point when numbers get so big as to become near incomprehensible. Almost five million people are waiting for health treatment in England alone. Almost 1.2m of them have been waiting at least six months for ‘vital appointments’. Some within the NHS say that in reality that number is far, far greater – […]
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Remote Work Is Always Efficient But Efficient Isn’t Always Effective
There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Peter Drucker This week marked my return to in-person facilitation after 16 months. I’m not going to lie. As I began the week with a 5:30am start and a 90 minute commute, I was hardly overjoyed […]
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Why We Fail To Predict The Future
rns out very different than we imagine. The more our organisations actively think about the future the easier it becomes to close the future gap and put yourself into that future.
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Why The Employee Idea Scheme Doesn’t Work
The concept of asking employees to share their ideas to drive innovation is always a good one. Unfortunately, the traditional suggestion scheme is, in my opinion, not the way to go about it.
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Community Is The Most Powerful Unit Of Change
We are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. We’re not very pessimistic about our village, we are not pessimistic about our town – but we are very pessimistic about our country, and even more pessimistic about the future of our planet. The bigger the unit you look at the […]
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Can The Pandemic Usher In An Era of Creative Disruption?
If we’d followed a conventional big transformation/ big consultancy approach to vaccine development and deployment we’d be getting our jabs sometime around the middle of 2033. The question is, can your organisation draw on the lessons of the pandemic to forge a more effective partnership with your customers and stakeholders?
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Three Innovation Aspirations For 2021
In 2021 perhaps the bravest and most radical thing you could do is to change your mind.
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How To Prepare For The Future of Housing
Community groups and individuals have delivered the most useful support networks in a physically distanced world. So now is the time for social landlords to revisit our purpose and reflect on the non value-adding activities that our organisations are involved i
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The Creative Value Of Open-Mindedness
Innovation is, essentially, about being endlessly curious. Curious, and a little bit paranoid that the way you do things isn’t the best way. Looking outside your organisation means gathering and understanding trends and weak signals that indicate emerging needs or opportunities. These weak signals are often overlooked or ignored by organisations that will only listen […]
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Putting The Needs Of The User Before The System
Are some countries more innovative than others? Certainly many have tried to measure it, with the UK being outperformed by the likes of South Korea, Israel and Finland. As the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla has said, the role of Government when it comes to encouraging innovation is crucial: “We need to make sure that […]
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Moving From The Reactive To The Pre-Emptive
As Matthew Manos has written, many of us in the social sector are employed in the expectation that the things that go wrong will always go wrong. Indeed, our work often profits from past societal failure rather than the contemplation of the signals of failures that have yet to exist. The entire premise relies on […]
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How Technology Can Increase Collaboration And Build Trust
This post is an shortened version of a plenary talk delivered in Cardiff for the Wales Audit Office Depending on your age it’s likely that the two things you were not taught in school were: a) how to collaborate effectively and b) how to use technology to connect and share with others And yet these […]
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The Smartest People Will Never Work For You
Joy’s law is the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”. Bill Joy, the computer engineer to whom it’s attributed argued that if you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs. It’s a quote that’s never been more true. Joy […]
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Does Regulation Really Stifle Innovation?
Last week I did a presentation to a group of managers when the issue of governance and regulation ‘getting in the way’ of innovation came up. People often think regulations stifle innovation, new business and services. They assume that regulators are there to control and curtail what they want to do. “We are so heavily […]
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How To Kill Ideas
We were asked a really good question last week with the visit to Bromford of the Disruptive Innovators Network. How long should you spend on an idea? In the early days of Bromford Lab we had a 12 WEEKS MAX rule. If we couldn’t get an idea up and running within that time – it should […]
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Lessons Learned From Five Years of Failure
Sometimes the execution of the idea doesn’t need to be the best to succeed. In 1989 a video game designer called Gunpei Yokoi changed the world with the launch of the original Nintendo Game Boy. It took gaming out of the hands of geeks and paved the way for the industry to become the most […]
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Creating The Right Culture For Innovation and Change
I’m not sure I buy into the concept of organisations having a culture of innovation. After all, innovation is a process consisting of four things: Having an idea that solves a problem Doing something with that idea Proving that it delivers new value for people Translating it into reality and making it part of the […]
Paul Taylor 