In this webinar hosted by Innocentive I explore how organizations can utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources as an essential talent management strategy to drive their business.
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“The more successful an organization becomes the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets the more it focuses on optimizing its resources. The more it optimizes it resources the more it eliminates variation. Innovation requires variation. We have seen the enemy and he is us.”
– Jeff DeGraff
“It is in identifying which of The Nine Innovation Roles are vacant (or sub-optimally filled) that you will be able to see some of the areas where your efforts are likely to come up short, and then can take actions to improve your chances of innovation success.”
– Braden Kelley
“It is not enough to simply go through the motions. In order to build our abilities, cognitive or otherwise, we must think about what we’re doing, concentrate while we’re doing it and then review what we have done. Further, we need to seek out mentors and peers who will critique our efforts.”
– Greg Satell
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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It is much easier to lose your nerve than it is to regain it, so better not to lose it in the first place. I have lost my nerve before and made decisions I regretted for a long time after they were made. Acting out of fear leads to poor decision making and a lack of leverage that, in turn, leads to unfavorable outcomes. That is why you must maintain your nerve and focus on the actions you need to take to create positive change, rather than allowing yourself to be overtaken by fear. Fear is one of those emotions that grows to fill the space.
When this downturn began, I had a client that wanted to extend our contract at half the previous rate in order to cut costs. Without any other projects in hand it would have been very easy to take their offer and hope that something better would come along. It’s much harder to walk away from guaranteed income and focus on winning new clients during the biggest downturn in a generation, but I did. The outcome?
Not losing my nerve, refusing this offer, and fully dedicating myself to revitalizing my business led to:
So before you lose your nerve and start asking yourself all those questions about what could go wrong, focus instead on asking yourself about the actions you could take now to make sure that things go right.
Are you going to be nervous in the downturn, or nervy? If you act fearful, your clients will be afraid to do business with you, but if you’re confident that you will do great things, then your clients will want to do great things with you.
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“Companies do not fall primarily because of what the world does to them or because of how the world changes around them. They fall first and foremost because of what they do to themselves.”
– Jim Collins
“To innovate continuously, you need to be open to receiving great ideas from anywhere in the company, and must have systems and processes to manage idea gathering, evaluation, and development. Often this requires a financial and personnel investment.”
– Braden Kelley
“Somehow I can’t believe there aren’t many heights that can’t be scaled by one who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret can be summarized in four C’s. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy, and the greatest of these is Confidence.”
– Walt Disney
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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“One who fears limits his activities. Failure is the only opportunity to more intelligently begin again.”
– Henry Ford
“Too often we form innovation teams based on who is available instead of focusing on who will make the innovation team successful.”
– Braden Kelley
“If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.”
– John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
– Steve Jobs
– Submitted by Lorna Tyrtania
“When you’re playing king of the mountain, you don’t stop playing when you get to the top.”
– Braden Kelley
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
– Albert Einstein
– Submitted by Carlos Torres
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about innovation personalities and the like, and I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not). So, I would like to add my Nine Innovation Roles to the conversation.
The following is an excerpt from my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:
Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.
I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.
Here are The Nine Innovation Roles:
1. Revolutionary
2. Conscript
3. Connector
4. Artist
5. Customer Champion
6. Troubleshooter
7. Judge
8. Magic Maker
9. Evangelist
As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to suboptimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people.
If you would prefer, here is a slide deck that I posted to slideshare.net:
Action Items
Sound off in the comments below.
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Now that my local Blockbuster has gone out of business, I’ve made the jump and joined Netflix (although I will miss taking trips to Blockbuster with my daughter).
The first disc in my queue to arrive was the venerable, enjoyable Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I was very excited to share this musical celebration of innovation with my daughter last night.
The story of course puts innovation (and learning from failure) front and center, and is a lot of fun at the same time.
The star object is of course the car, but the best supporting object as it were, is a sweet with holes in it.
At first nobody thinks much of the sweets with holes in them made by one of the Dick Van Dyke character’s inventions (“your sugar is getting too hot” comments Truly Scrumptious), but then he discovers that these sweets with holes in them can work like little miniature flutes and he thinks he is on to something. But, after demonstrating them at the candy factory a mob of dogs swarms the place, and he has to flee the scene (no sale). It’s only at the very end that the sweet failure is again transformed into a treat for dogs and everyone is going to become very wealthy as a result.
It’s a great lesson in changing perspectives, learning from failure when it does occur and also illustrates that sometimes you have to adapt an invention from your intended target market to another one in order to transform the invention into a successful innovation.
But, learning from failure is highlighted in an even more fun (and musical) way in the ‘The Roses of Success’ number.
If you’d like to see the video of the song, here it is:
And if you’d like to give the words a closer look, here are the lyrics (courtesy stlyrics.com):
Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you’ll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Oh yes!
Grow the roses!
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
(spoken)Yes I know but he wants it to float. It will!
For every big mistake you make be grateful!
Here, here!
That mistake you’ll never make again!
No sir!
Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
Generates the steam for two more tries!
(Oh) There’s magic in the wake of a fiasco!
Correct!
It gives you that chance to second guess!
Oh yes!
Then up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
Disaster didn’t stymie Louis Pasteur!
No sir!
Edison took years to see the light!
Right!
Alexander Graham knew failure well; he took a lot of knocks to ring that bell!
So when it gets distressing it’s a blessing!
Onward and upward you must press!
Yes, Yes!
Till up from the ashes, up from the ashes grow the roses of success.
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!
Grow the ro
Grow the ro
Grow the roses!
Those rosy ro
Those rosy ro
Those rosy roses!
From the ashes of disaster, grow the roses of success!
Start the engines!
Success!
Batten the hatches!
Success!
Man the shrouds!
Lift the anchor!
Success!
P.S. If you enjoyed this post you should check out my post – Another Innovation Movie for Kids
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