Buzzwords or phrases are great to try to convey an idea quickly and easily to a wide number of people, however, they should not set your policy on how to do things. One particular phase “Fail Fast, Fail Often” has been used a lot when talking about Innovation, Agile Development and now Dev Ops. I hate it!
I have been a little quiet on the blog over the last few months due to work. However, I would like to share a post from me that went out on the Ciena blog site and the associated white paper that I wrote in collaboration with Adan Pope:
Using “The 3 V’s of Automation” to maximize automation ROI
Creating Intelligent Hybrid Operations
I hope you enjoy reading them and please feel free to provide feedback on the Ciena website, here or directly to me.
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In larger companies, it is common and beneficial to have more than one innovation program. In fact, I have seen situations where there are close to 100 different programs or teams looking for ideas in large companies. The challenge comes with how you stop each one doing the same thing and defining the boundaries of the day to day operational groups. This post will look at one way you can try to bring some harmony to all the possible activities within your company.
The fundamental part of the ideation process is the selection of ideas. Too many people see innovation programs as idea blockers killing ideas by applying “Toll Gates” at various stages of the process. We look at how you can change that view and provide a balanced approach to idea selection.
Collecting ideas is a fundamental part of any innovation program, and how you do it makes a big difference to the results you will see. Here are 5 things you should think about and ensure you have a well-defined ideation process:
When looking at the idea collection process as part of an innovation program, it is easy to think that you will never get the number of ideas that you want. In the Ideation activities I have run, the majority of the ideas are submitted in the final week. Here are some statistics to help you understand the typical process and why it is not a bad thing to get last minute submissions.
Everybody wants to innovate or drive innovation, however, it seems very difficult for us to come to a common definition or set of terms when describing it. Innovation is not a thing, it is a process, and typically people describe abstract processes differently and use terminology that comes from other activities. In this post, I want to create a framework for innovation terminology to help people new to the topic understand how these terms relate to each other.
I care about innovation because I think that innovation is needed for a society to develop. I know people think that innovation is for companies only but in many cases, the benefactor of truly new ideas are the everyday people like you and me.
I am just setting up this new Blog and will be heads-down creating posts over the next few months to share. I plan to focus on driving innovation within larger companies (Intrepreneurship) and IT Evolution. The content comes from the experience that I have gained in working in this area and I hope that it may help others in finding new ideas to drive growth for their organizations.
Peter Briscoe 