February 28, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Teresa Amabile on the Importance of Acknowledging Progress
Why This Book from Teresa Amabile on Vimeo.
MitchDitkoff.com
IdeaChampions
February 28, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Learning to Fail Fast through Play, Playfulness and Improvisation
This is the third blog in our series of 3 blogs, on cultivating a fail fast culture. In last month’s blog, Cultivating a Fail Fast Culture – as a manifestation of learning & exploration we explored what it means to take a reflective stance, to use the experience of failure to support ourselves and others …
February 28, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
What You Must Consider to Remain Relevant
For some time now I have believed 70% of my knowledge is obsolete. People look at me strangely when I say this. How can all those years of experience be wasted? If you were told that students graduating in 2016 will have obsolete qualifications for whi…
February 27, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovations Degrees of Connectivity, Interactivity and Sharing
We often forget it is our people that really make innovation work. They determine the ideas, drive these forward to deliver them as new innovative concepts into the world. People connect the fragmented pieces or dots within innovation from being random…
February 27, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Is Big Data Doing More Harm Than Good?
In 1931, a 25 year-old Austrian named Kurt Gödel defied logic, literally, with his incompleteness theorems which proved that every formal system eventually fails. What made this discovery even more devastating was that Gödel himself was a logician and his theorems took the form of a logical proof. Essentially, he used logic to kill logic. Of course, …
February 26, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
The prerequisites for trust in teamwork and creativity
Creative and collaborative teamwork will only take place if there is a high level of trust among team members. Trust allows members of the team to do three things that produce true collaboration. The first is to be vulnerable with each other, ask stupid questions, and propose stupid ideas. Without this vulnerability, team members are reserved and will keep …
February 26, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
How to Capture Your Strategy in a Single Sentence
If I were to ask you what your company/unit/team strategy is, could you answer in a single sentence? Is that even possible? And even if it is, why would you want to (other than to respond to some smart-aleck strategy facilitator)? I know it’s possible, and there are several worth reasons for stating strategy in …
February 25, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Sick Care is a Wicked Problem
Sick care is a wicked problem. By that, I don’t mean just scary. A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these …
February 25, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Take 30 Seconds to Do This Every Day and You Will Be Forever Changed
We all have a bucket list, but what about your un-bucket list? Courage is not a personality trait; it is a discipline. I worked my way through college as a nurse’s aid in a spinal chord injury unit of a local Boston hospital. I had zero qualifications for the job other than being strong enough …
February 24, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
A Wishlist of Innovation Mindsets
A few years back I published an article on LinkedIn on the The 7 Magic Roles for Creating Sustainable Innovation Culture based on my experiences in working for, building and putting to work effective innovation teams. What dawned on me recently is that…
February 23, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Here’s Why Your Innovation Strategy Will Fail
A decade ago, Apple looked unbeatable. It’s launch of the iPhone completely revolutionized mobile phones and made good on Steve Jobs’ vision of creating a hub of devices that connected people to technology. What’s more, he did it with just a fraction of the research budget of other tech giants. Yet now Apple seems stagnant. …
February 23, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Design Thinking and the Customer-Centric Organization
“There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.” “But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has …
February 22, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Are you crazy enough to think you can change the world?
Back in 1997 some of you reading this were not even born, but Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple. It was 12 years since he had been fired from the company he had created with Steve Wozniak in 1976. At that point, one of the greatest marketing campai…
February 22, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
One Thing You Must Master to Succeed in Business and in Life
This may well be the most important factor in determining your professional and personal success. One thing I’ve realized about the most successful people I’ve met is that whatever their varied personalities and idiosyncrasies, there is one attribute they consistently share: high “conversational intelligence.” Simply put, conversational intelligence is the currency of success. It’s the …
February 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
How to Go Beyond the Email Blues
In 1999, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek blues song about email.
My purpose was to poke fun at some of the email madness going on at that time. (If you want to give a listen, click the link above).
It’s 18 years later now and the email scene has become …
February 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Digital Technology is Changing the Innovation Game
Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We continually learn, often at our cost, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ on research set up and gathered weeks or more often months ago. This ‘knowledge’ is becoming out …
February 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
10 Ways Higher Education Could Be Transformed to Support the Needs of a Changing World
Is there a future for higher education? There is probably no other industry or social institution quite as invested in the future than education, yet its struggles with self-reinvention manifest as a ticking time bomb, putting the future of both the in…
February 20, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovation Sighting: Task Unification in Cars That Advertise
Imagine pulling out of the driveway for your regular jaunt to the grocery store. While turning the corner to exit your neighborhood the car console screen lights up with an ad for the latest laundry detergent. Perhaps the concept seems…
February 20, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Double Your Creativity with ONE Simple Step
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein You would think by publishing a …
February 20, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovation Programs In Schools Can Help Kids Learn More Than Just Facts
Traditionally, we went to school to attain knowledge. The smart kids knew that Columbus discovered America in 1492 and that the square root of 64 is eight. They studied diligently at home so that when the teacher asked a question they could shoot their…
February 19, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Solving Wicked Problems
Premise: DW Akademie recently reported that Germany would like to experiment with making public transportation free in 5 of its cities to explore if this can help it meet the pollution norms of European Union. The question is if this is the approach that will produce the results that it is expecting to achieve. This in addition …
February 18, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
5 Questions to Ask Whenever You Feel Like Giving Up
The hardest decision you’ll ever make is to move on; before you do, answer these 5 questions. As entrepreneurs we believe in our ability to build the future more than anyone else possibly could. In our mind there is never any doubt that what we are creating is needed by the world. That’s why we …
February 17, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Understanding 25 Cognitive Biases That Impact Business [Infographic]
The best way to combat a cognitive bias is to have awareness of its existence and how you or those around you will react to certain informational stimuli. In business, these cognitive biases can actually work in your favor as you provide people with ju…
February 17, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Demanding a category experience from your agencies is a red herring
Imagine how you’d feel if you were going into hospital for an operation and the surgeon had only ever assisted in operations before? Or, if you go and get legal advice from a commercial solicitor only to find that their specialism is family law. If you’re at all like me, you’d be more than a …
February 16, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
10 Tips for Innovating Out Of The Box
Think “out of the box”…you’ll find you’re still inside a larger box! Learning to think outside of the box is critical to innovation and creating competitive advantage. Creative thinking requires learning how to get beyond the real and perceived limiting barriers. The expression “thinking out of the box” came from the nine dot puzzle by …
February 16, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovators, What is Your Strategy if the Market Crashes?
Obviously the stock market, and more importantly, the economy in general has a big impact on innovation. But whether or not it makes sense from a long term vision, investment in innovation is often one of the first places to get hit when money gets tight. We have all got somewhat used to a …
February 15, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovation and Strategy Need Opposite Types of Motivation
The proper motivation… For a long time it was accepted that incentives, and specifically financial incentives, would motivate any type of desired business behavior. In other words–everyone has a price. There are two main types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within the task itself, and directly by the value of the benefit from completing it. …
February 15, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
These Two Words Will Change Your Perception of Jeff Bezos and Amazon
It’s easy to criticize Amazon until you realize that what Bezos is doing is what every disruptive company desperately needs. The firestorm of controversy about the work environment at Amazon, sparked by the New York Times article a couple of years ago, has become almost religious. Not only did it surface an important dialogue about …
February 14, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
The Path Is Made By Walking On It
Back in the late 1990s, in New York City, there lived a world-class architect who had just spent the last two years of his life designing and building what many people were claiming to be the best inner city housing project ever conceived.
February 14, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Why Sickcare Innovation Centers Don’t Deliver
If you work for a big, established company, you’ve probably been noticing the sudden rise of a new trend: the innovation lab. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines, Target, Google, Pfizer, Marriott, Autodesk, Fidelity Investments, Ford, Verizon, and Stanley Black & Decker are jumping on the bandwagon. As discussed on this site recently, open innovation labs …