Blog

“Cruel Transparency”: The Brave Practice That Lets Innovators Learn from Their Mistakes As readers of my book Built to Innovate may remember, one of the companies I’ve worked with as an innovation coach is Sabancı Holding, one of the biggest—and…

Can Your Sales Team Capture the Voice of the Customer? It Depends In my blog posts as well as in my book Built to Innovate, I’ve emphasized the importance of the voice of the customer as a source of innovative…

A Few Magic Words That Can Help to Create a Culture of Innovation As I’ve explained elsewhere, one of the most crucial roles in creating your organization’s innovation engine and keeping it running effectively is played by middle managers. Front…

How to Turn the Potential of Digital Transformation into an Innovative Reality In recent years, one of the dominant models of innovation has been digital transformation—the notion that businesses need to take advantage of new technologies, from the internet, smart…

Reframing Your Big Picture: Business Model Innovation As I explain in my book Built to Innovate, the most important role that senior leaders can play in making their organizations into powerful innovators is to become “reframers in chief”—advocates, cheerleaders, and…

It Takes All Kinds to Innovate: Creating a Cross-Disciplinary Space Where Creativity Can Thrive One of the big differences between your company’s execution engine and its innovating engine is in the way people, resources, and activities are organized in the…

Finding the Diamond in the Rough: The Magic of the Customer Utility Table In my last blog post, I spoke about the importance of innovating not just when developing new products or services, but in everything you do. But this…

You Can Innovate in Anything You Do I’ve often spoken and written about the heroic myth of innovation—that business creativity is the province of a few geniuses like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, who exist on a different plane from…

Why Silo-Busting Teamwork Drives Your Innovating Engine One of the biggest reasons many companies struggle to innovate is the barriers between different business units and the individuals who work in them. These barriers may be organizational, functional, cultural, or all…

Listening to the Silence of the Customer: How to Be a Fly on the Wall In previous blog posts, I’ve spoken about the importance of stepping into the shoes of your customer as a key step in becoming more innovative. In fact,…

Eager to Innovate? Get Out from Behind Your Desk In my last blog post, I described a simple way most organizations can jump start their capacity for innovating. It involved, first, giving everyone in your organization permission to innovate; then,…

To Flip the Innovating Switch, Become a Customer As an innovation trainer, I am often asked by business leaders, “How can we jumpstart the practice of innovating at our organization?” After all, most companies at least pay lip service to…

“Make Others Jealous”—A New Motto for Innovators You may have heard the saying, “Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.” It’s an expression typically addressed to frontline innovators to encourage them to try new things. It reflects the fact that,…

Focus on Innovating and You’ll Get Innovation In the minds of many people, the words innovation and innovating are synonyms—two words that mean exactly the same thing. Technically, that may be true! Yet as a business school professor and a…