Leading innovation is one of the most challenging areas of leadership. Here’s a little light inspiration to help you.
Lee McEwan in his Serendipity Book spots an interesting approach to innovating for customers based on adding something. I think Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck Business School, currently seconded to help GE with their innovation, calls this ‘adjacency innovation’ - Take two unrelated things and stick them together to produce a novelty.
“Turn your favourite office tool from your desk into common cutlery…this is din-ink. A set of pen caps, including a fork-cap, a knife-cap and a spoon-cap, that replaces the normal pen cap during lunch time! All caps are made by annually renewable resources, like natural starch and fibres, to be 100% biodegradable and atoxic, warranting the best alimentary use. Dispensing each set in a compostable packaging the whole set is designed to respect the environment. Now give your office ballpoint pen a good excuse to be gnawed by your teeth: use them for din-ink.”
Leading innovation will be one of the key themes at Leaders in London 2008. Click on the link to see the newly-announced speakers, including Prof. Govindarajan (of ‘adjacency innovation’ fame, see above), from Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, currently spending a year as GE’s Innovation Professor in Residence to help General Electric improve at innnovation.
Professor Gary Hamel will be telling us how to innovate in management and Jack Welch sharing with us how he increased the ‘innovation index’ at GE.
Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Emotional Intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, former Medtronics’ CEO (author of True North and now a Harvard Professor) Bill George, two-term Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, and Nobel prizewinner Muhammad Yunus (who grew GrameenBank from nothing to a $5 billion enterprise) are among the confirmed speakers. More detail on the ‘Leaders in London’ link below or above.
Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub
Entries (RSS)