Questions to ask before reading:

Have the strategies you’ve (or your  team) developed for your company or organization been successful?

If not, do you fault the strategy or the execution?

Do you see strategy and execution as two distinct activities?

_______________________________________________________

Recently, I wrote about Loopy Innovation. Loopy is colloquialism used by neuroscientists to describe how the brain really functions — where different parts of the brain “contribute” and process information.

Creating a process or approach to innovation (often four to ten steps) makes it easier to ...

In the early 90’s, The Martin Agency asked me to write one of the first Marriott web sites.  Martin had recently created an outstanding and forward-thinking site for Coca Cola and I jumped at the chance.

The site was in the form of aTraveler’s Journal and it had the just right number of bells and whistles that the age of dial-up modem could handle. It was a success and over time evolved into a more business-oriented site.

But the prevailing question at ...

Imagine opening a new store, stocking the shelves full of a hundreds of products and discovering that consumers buy only one of your products.

The savvy entrepreneur would probably toss most of the shelf-hogging SKUs and let the rainmaker product reign supreme.

And that’s precisely what’s happening in the idea generation field. In a national survey, conducted by Inotivity, there is a surprising lack of awareness of different ideation techniques. This echoes the results our colleagues at SmartStorming received in a 2010 survey.

The ...

In the laudable attempt to simplify innovation,  most innovation gurus have created a kind of  linear process.  It’s typically four or five sequential  steps that follow a similar pattern of problem definition, ideation and finally implementation.  These approaches  are brilliant in that they make the complex understandable and set the foundation for further learning.

But the reality of innovation is a bit more complicated.

A good metaphor can be found the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s enlightening book, Incognito.  It began with the discovery ...