Aligning Your Stakeholders to Maximize Competitiveness

Leadership is often not about the leader but about those surrounding the leader.

Balancing the needs of your stakeholders with those of the greater organization can streamline your innovation process to make your organization more competitive. How does one assess their own str

Fuzzy Front End to Commercial Introduction

We have all tried to get through the fuzzy front end as soon as possible to get to market. Getting specific criteria from marketing upfront helps the technical folks select the right ingredients for the potential product.

The Essentials of Innovation

Given enough time to think about it, we all probably know the essentials of innovation based on our own experiences. Yet these essentials can be so difficult to apply in corporate cultures with different heritages. So application becomes the key […]

Four Steps Toward Innovation

I have always likened the process of innovation to a baseball diamond. Four bases to round home (i.e., commercialization) is the equivalent to simplifying the innovation process to four steps: 1) create insight 2) define the problem 3) craft the […]

Creativity is a Process of Surrender, Not of Control

In today’s culture, especially the competitive culture of corporations, the concept of surrender does not get praise and acknowledgement. Certainly, the process of triage in the early stages of development can be viewed as surrendering. This early quitting and letting […]

Fear of Failure Delays Innovation

Most folks experienced in innovation and commercial development have experienced failure. Failure in this context is merely one step forward toward ultimate success. The key is to reduce risks of large failures. Many new products newly commercialized need updates, fix-its, […]

Fuzzy Front End to Commercial Introduction

The Pace and Cadence of Innovation

Let’s face it, innovation is not like a finely-tuned engine operating at optimum capacity all of the time. How do you anticipate the ebbs and flows that invariably crop up with the pace of innovation, let alone the workload (which […]

Leadership

What more natural a subject to first talk about than leadership, both personal and organizational. Everything flows from the top; this is true for our own lives and for the life of an organization. Simply, a leader leads where others […]

Create Ideas, Innovate to Commercialize

Innovation is the application of creative ideas. One can create a new ingredient yet we need to deliver the ingredient in a vehicle acceptable to the end user, typically consumers. Brainstorming creat ideas and possibilities. The complexity is how to […]