Each week I scour articles, wading through the dogs, and bringing you the best insights to help product managers, developers, and innovators be heroes.

 

Steve Blank’s insights from adapting Lean for corporations and government agencies. “I’ve spent this year working with corporations and government agencies trying to adapt and adopt Lean Methodologies.  In doing so I’ve learned a ton from lots of people. I’ve summarized my learnings in this blog post…” Read more at Steve Blank http://steveblank.com/2015/08/21/innovation-50x-in-companies-and-government-agencies/

 

Don’t pay for innovation – get the culture right instead in 3 steps. “Turning a traditional company into an innovation machine won’t happen overnight. But if you focus on culture rather than just cash, you’ll probably have a better chance of success.” Read more at Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/ronashkenas/2015/08/21/to-create-an-innovation-company-focus-on-culture-instead-of-cash/

90% of enterprise innovation centers fail – ROI needed. “Up to 90 percent of enterprise innovation centres fail and prove to be a massive waste of resources, according to a recently released report, in a stark warning for Australia’s innovation-hungry enterprises.
Read more at IT News http://www.itnews.com.au/News/408184,innovation-centres-a-waste-of-time-resources.aspx

4 rules for building open source software products. “There are four rules to understand when building products out of open source software. A product team (engineering, product management, marketing) needs to understand these rules to participate best in an open source project community and deliver products and services to their customers at the same time.” Read more at Open Source http://opensource.com/business/15/8/open-source-products-four-rules

Finding positive tension as the catalyst of innovation-this map will show you how. “In my own work strategizing innovation practices for some of the world’s biggest and best companies, I use the Innovation Genome to find this place of positive tension. The Innovation Genome is a creative map of organizational dynamics that tells us how competing talents and seemingly opposing worldviews can come together to promote growth.” Read more at Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-degraff/a-map-for-engineering-you_b_8032480.html

7 steps for igniting innovation in small companies. “Innovation is thought inspired by creativity, movement, belief and action. It is about opening your mind to new possibilities by moving past fixed and rigid thinking into more nontraditional and risk-taking thought processes. To remain competitive in business, innovation is everything.” Read more from Entrepreneur http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249967

How to begin product innovation using customers’ experience. “While companies must continue to develop new, high-quality products, and meaningful new features for established products, there is another approach to innovation they should consider, but is often left on the table: innovating around customer experience goals. Read more at B2C http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/why-innovation-must-build-from-your-customer-experience-01309671

Research findings- how to turn innovation from theory into reality. “The goal of the research was to identify best practices in innovation. The results suggest that the organizations that are best at innovation share a number of traits.” Read more at Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2015/08/26/how-to-turn-innovation-from-theory-into-reality/

Enable creativity to fuel innovation. “Too often, companies create or encourage a culture where those who take risks are often penalized. Yet truly great companies (with the accompanying customer loyalty and confidence) thrive in the presence of it, while potential superstar companies die for the lack of it.” Read more at Medium https://medium.com/@davidbrier/innovation-hell-saving-good-ideas-from-premature-death-38312c993e3b

CIO strategies to consider for enabling innovation from the outside. “For our organization, I’ve always tried to have IT be an early adopter of new technology, and to be creative in solving problems. But that gets tough as the IT organization gets larger, and the pressures of day to day operations and projects consume time and energy. Often times there is insufficient bandwidth or leftover resources to think strategically and creatively, let alone pay attention to innovation that’s occurring outside our company.” Read more at Heller Search http://blog.hellersearch.com/blog/strategies-for-bringing-innovation-from-the-outside-in