One of the biggest obstacles to successful innovation efforts is a challenge familiar to any entrepreneur: funding. Good ideas take time and money to get off the ground. But when those ideas are relatively “out there” or unproven, the investment can be hard to justify. This is especially true in a corporate environment. Standard corporate funding models for technology projects
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Stop Sweating Your Assets to Start Driving Innovation
The popular business book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” offers personal and professional advice based on a simple premise: the skills and talents that got you promoted to a senior level are not the same as those required to succeed at that level. This applies in the corporate world or in our home lives; ask anyone who
How to Stave Off Maturity – 3 Steps to Strategic Innovation
The old adage is still true today: “If a business isn’t growing, it’s dying.” In eras past, it may have been possible for a business to coast through its mature stage and continue to generate reasonable profits. However, in the modern day of rapid technological advancement, a business must implement significant amounts of change to simply maintain current performance. Companies
5 Steps to a Realistic, Repeatable Innovation Process
Innovation in a business context cannot be a simple flash of brilliance. (It typically isn’t a simple flash of brilliance in any case, as we’ll discuss below.) Even in the rare cases that an innovative idea seems to come from nowhere, it must not end there. Businesses, and especially IT departments, need to deliver outcomes. A cool new gadget, algorithm,
3 Strategies for Measuring the Impact of Innovation
For today’s leading companies, innovation is no longer optional. The imperative to transform your offerings while simultaneously driving productivity and cost savings continues to grow more urgent as the pace of technology accelerates. But while innovation is a key component of any modern business plan, it also enjoys a singular status among most organizations’ critical strategies: it’s the only one
The Biggest Risk to Your IT Department that You’re Not Addressing
Today’s IT departments face a profound challenge: the delicate and precarious balance between stability and innovation. “Keeping the lights on” has never been more important. Business quite literally runs on technology and any downtime or blips in the user experience can cause major negative consequences, from brand equity and sales to internal productivity and morale. But innovation is equally imperative.
The Insult of Black Friday | What About the Customer?
Amazon is supposedly killing Black Friday by introducing their holiday sales immediately after Halloween. The trend over the last few years of getting a jump on the huge shopping day by starting on Thanksgiving created some backlash and companies are differentiating themselves be deciding not to open their door on the day that is traditionally spent with family. Much of
A Lesson to be Learned from Delta Airlines’ System Outage
Bimodal IT has become common parlance. It is the term for the underlying assumption that large enterprises require stability in their core IT systems, and should therefore not take the risk of migrating to new technology. Instead, the old systems should be maintained in their current condition – or a condition that is fundamentally the same with only minor adjustments
Social Media Analytics – It’s More Than Listening
As social engagement increasingly infiltrates every facet of consumer life, it continues to evolve as a major component in a B2C company’s strategy. For example, during the annual review of the Super Bowl commercials this year, several commentaries suggested the best spots were those that included a social media call to action. Not surprisingly, now that social media is ubiquitous,
Man(agement) versus Data – Who will win?
I recently read a blog posts that suggested that big data was going to revolutionize management science. It suggested that historically, businesses have been driven by management fads that were merely hypothesis-based approaches backed up at best by a few case studies. In the future, with access to unbiased data, we will be able to move to an evidenced-based management
