Innovation

The HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum is a unit of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana and an organization truly focused on health care, not just illness care. In a recent profile, one employee cited the need for trial-and-error in the design of their education programs, “To innovate, we need to make at least eight mistakes a…

Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age comes to PBS (in NYC, on Monday, Nov 22 at 10pm) Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each…

The company suggestion box is growing in size and sophistication. Taking a cue from the software industry which subsidizes innovation by letting passionate customers beta test new products, companies like Bose are setting up forums for ideas. They recognize that innovation needs to be open, tapping creativity from inside and outside the organization. The system…

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Think for yourself – stop copying a rival make a great case for reducing the focus on competition and refocusing on innovation: Assisted by new means to analyse competitors and influence their behaviour, companies [in the 1980’s] placed competition at the centre of strategic thinking, where it has…

From an interview in BusinessWeek… On motives: …motives make so much difference. …our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest. We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit — both to make some money but also so we can…