Innovation Excellence The World's Most Popular Innovation Web Site

My 12-year old son recently got a belt sander from his Opa. Opa is a German name for grandfather.  My son is making a bookshelf and has a lot of sanding to do. The belt sander will do the work quickly. It is the right tool for the job, but only if it is used properly. The powerful motor and ...

Automation, robotics, displaced workers, outsourcing, offshoring, near-shoring, smartsourcing… These are all words that strike fear into the ordinary working man and woman, American, or otherwise… Now comes a new set of words from the intelligentsia promising to fix it all for the common person, phrases like “guaranteed income” and “universal income” have emerged into the conversation. But can schemes like ...

Five days for an innovation journey: is it speed or haste? Using the three basic premises of Design Thinking – Immersion, Ideation and Prototyping – and leveraging the creation of a multidisciplinary environment, Design Sprint is emerging as new way for accelerated innovation, where speed and innovation go hand in hand. Design Sprint is a smart track for fast experimentation: ...

Lines of Innovation – Part II In a previous article (Lines of Innovation – Part I) I wrote about the importance of lines in thinking about innovation.  In this sequel, I will focus on additional examples where lines provide insight into the challenge of driving innovation.  A common theme of this article is the importance of the abstract and the ...

What Did You Learn From 2017? Around the end of the year, most of us, and our businesses, tend to slow down just a bit from the normal dawn-to-dusk mad dash. We smile a bit more. We wave people in before us in traffic, and let others with less in their shopping carts go first in the grocery store. And ...

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. I love powerful quotes. Words can inspire entire societies to change and they act as mile markers for historical shifts. And few people have had the historical impact and amazingly eloquent quotability of Winston Churchill. Churchill ...

This week there was an article on INC. magazine that was wildly popular on social media. Elon Musk named his favorite books and there was only one business book out of 10. The rest were Science Fiction, Classics, Great Books. Many were surprised to learn that Musk finds inspiration in the arts and other fields and finds the canon of ...

It is clear that the internet has transformed how we shop.  More people are buying more products and services on-line than ever before.  High-street retailers and big brands are suffering at the hands of on-line merchants large and small.  There is one often overlooked innovation which has enabled this trend.  It is buyer/seller feedback. A key component of any business ...

Drum roll please… At the beginning of each month we will profile the twenty posts from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Innovation Excellence. We also publish a weekly Top 8 as part of our FREE email newsletter. Did your favorite make the cut? But enough delay, here are February’s twenty most popular innovation posts: 4 Things ...

So doctors are lousy business people, huh? Well, imagine if your doctor prescribed something based only on your chief complaint. They did not take a history. They did no physical exam and they did no lab tests or imaging if it were necessary . Yet, business people, particularly digipreneurs, do it all the time. If you think about it, entrepreneurs are continual ...