Where’s your innovation focus? – Part 1: Harmony

Innovation is never easy. Regardless of its purpose, you'll always have a lot to take into account: needs and expectations, resource implications, rules and regulations, the state of the art as well as technical limitations of legacy systems. Wrestling with all these constraints can easily distract you from your ultimate goal. To help you find your innovation focus, I'll revisit two conceptual maps I've discussed earlier to develop a hybrid navigation aid that combines the best of both concepts.

More sketches of an innovation

In the previous post, I introduced a graphical overview of innovation's inner workings, embedded in a circle of useful knowledge that innovation draws from, and contributes to. That chart might create an impression of innovation as a messy, even unwieldy process. To highlight the structure underneath, today I'll dissect it a little further. A simplified storyline of … Continue reading More sketches of an innovation →

Sketching an innovation

We all know that successful innovation is not easy to achieve. And still, we sometimes seem to hope that the 1% inspiration is more important than the 99% transpiration. Well, it's not. But instead of using a thousand words, this time I've tried to cast the story into a single graphic. Using my earlier working … Continue reading Sketching an innovation →

Dealing with unknown problems

Over the past few weeks, I've discussed how our innovation endeavour has become too focused on known problems. We have submersed ourselves in the bubble of the known problems to an extent that we are largely unprepared to deal with the unexpected. And that self-imposed myopia creates serious challenges. My argument essentially went through three steps: our established structures work very well for … Continue reading Dealing with unknown problems →

Why we need to broaden our innovation mindset

You might picture our established structures as the hardware that we run our innovation supply chain on. They certainly direct the energy, the resources we invest in innovation. And they have significant implications for our "innovation software", i.e., our understanding of innovation, our innovation mindset. That's what I'll discuss today along two main questions: the first deals with … Continue reading Why we need to broaden our innovation mindset →