innovation

Waste elimination seems pretty straightforward, right? Of course waste elimination is good, so why do we need a purpose? Because when we free up waste, most organizations don’t know what to do with it. To be clear about this, you first need to be clear about the strategic direction or

A new blog post on the Blogging Innovation website, There’s Always Another New Approach… Last year I saw a comment from a respected entrepreneur who was claiming “all the big ideas have already been created.” I was highly disappointed, because it’s reeks of pre-1492 attitudes about the Earth. You can’t

How do you spread good ideas across your organization? My fellow blogger Jon Miller wrote a great post on Yokoten, or lateral deployment, a couple months ago. It’s a great post, both because of it’s content but also because of it’s importance. How much is an idea worth to your

I’ve written before that problems solving is a key still for innovation, in 3 Key Stills that Enable Innovation. This is why we must be building problem solving skills at every level of the organization. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this is simply defining the problem. It’s

When you test, what attributes are you testing for? Most testing begins with design criteria. This is reasonable to include but not the right starting point. You must develop with the user in mind. You must test with the user in mind. You must test for actual use, not just

Over on the Lean Blog Mark Graban wrote a post titled Innovation Is as Innovation Does? Besides channeling Forrest Gump, this makes a great point. Innovation is an outcome, but without a process we won’t get it. And that process includes culture, skill, systems, methods, and so on. Mark makes

Yesterday was apparently Blog Action Day ’09 on Climate Change. At my last check, 13,163 blogs are writing about climate change today. With that in mind, I partly want to just leave it at that because there is probably a lot said in 1,000s of blogs already. But I’ll add