Dr Samuel West, the psychologist who created The Museum Of Failure, argues that the best way to drive innovation within organizations is to remove the fear of failure. The fear of failure can lead corporate innovation teams to only pursue safe bets. When innovation teams work on safe bets, it…

Without leadership support, corporate innovation projects are dead on arrival. Leadership support is so important that this is the first thing I ask for when I am working with innovation teams. I have worked with several teams that have tried to avoid getting leadership support for their projects. However, they…

One of the most sensitive conversations to have with leaders is when I try to convince them that they cannot pick the winning ideas on day one. At one workshop, a regional leader kept insisting that the innovation teams need to bring her some ‘10X’ ideas. What she meant was…

What is better? Running your own startup or driving innovation within a large company? Steve Jobs was very clear that it is better to be a pirate than to join the navy. There are freedoms that come with running your own company. Startup founders do not have to answer to…

What is the one thing that legal and compliance teams hate about innovation teams? Being treated like a box to tick at the end of the innovation process. They really hate it when innovation teams come to them towards the end of their projects, asking them to approve something they…

There was a time when it was a real struggle to convince corporate leaders that their companies needed to innovate in order to create new growth. That argument seems to have been put to rest. Most leaders are now looking for ways to drive innovation within their companies. …

Imagine this scene. A team is pitching an innovation project to leaders using a slide deck with five year revenue projections, an execution roadmap and assumptions that are being presented as facts. After the presentation, the leaders take things from bad to worse. The finance director states that she cannot…

A lot of intrapreneurs ask me whether they should consider working on their ideas under the radar within their company. They are often worried that if they expose their innovative ideas to the company too soon, those ideas will be killed by corporate antibodies. This is not an irrational fear…

Intrapreneurship is not the same as entrepreneurship. While there may be some similarities, intrapreneurship has distinct challenges that require a different mindset from innovators. Our culture tends to celebrate the brash entrepreneur who takes risks and disrupts incumbent companies. …