27 August 10
“Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than limit it, to continue to attract and nourish innovative people, so we have a better chance of long-term continued success.”
– Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
To become more innovative, companies need to cultivate the key elements necessary for innovation— one of which is an innovation-friendly culture. To build a corporate climate that truly fosters innovation, you must be able to encourage smart risks and energize your workforce. Netflix, one of Fortune Magazine’s 100 fastest growing companies of 2010, does exactly this by promoting a culture of freedom and responsibility from the top down. The company’s commitment to these principles goes far beyond just a values statement chiseled in marble.
• Freedom — Netflix does not have a vacation policy and doesn’t track vacation time. Employees may take as many vacation days as they feel they need. When it comes to expenses and business travel, the only rule is to “act in Netflix’s best interests.”
• You Have to Believe — Netflix also requires that all employees take responsibility for contributing to the company’s success. High performers are substantially rewarded and the merely adequate are quickly let go.
Sound harsh? According to Hastings, “We need a culture that supports rapid innovation and excellent execution. Both are required for continuous growth. There is tension between these two goals: between creativity and discipline.”
How has balancing creativity and discipline paid off for Netflix? Read the rest of this entry »
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Media & Entertainment, Technology, Uncategorized | Tagged: innovation, creativity, Corporate Culture, Netflix | 
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Posted by Jenny Wang
26 August 10
Set against the stunning backdrop of the Cascade Mountains, this year’s 10 Conference promises to bring together an extraordinary group of people to explore some of the most important ideas shaping the future of business and society. Participants include scientists, educators, artists, economists, designers, and social entrepreneurs who will explore ten “catalytic” ideas, including wayfinding, resilience, sense-ploitation, and heroism, among others.
Taking place on October 27-29 in Leavenworth Washington, the conference promises to forego traditional keynotes and promote meaningful conversations instead. 10 is built around ten interconnected ideas, each explored through short, dynamic presentations from speakers with multiple perspectives and experiences. Speakers include a behavioral economist making new discoveries about the neuroscience of decision-making, a designer who creates social robots to work with autistic children, one of the world’s leading psychologists who has spent his career studying the cause of evil, now on a quest to understand the causes of heroism, and many others.
In addition to stimulating talks, the two-day program is packed with award-winning food and wine, as well as extraordinary performances from musicians and artists. For more information on the conference please visit tenconference.org.
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Posted by Doron Yaghoubi
13 August 10
With an impressive array of business, credit, metro, and various loyalty cards bursting out of our expanding wallets, a move to digitize plastic cards may come as a pleasant reprieve to many. Earlier this month, Bloomberg uncovered a planned venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to develop a smartphone based payment system designed to compete directly with credit card companies. Using a technology known as NFC (Near Field Communication) embedded into mobile phones; payments would be made by holding the smartphone over a special reader that can communicate with the phone. This method differs from RFID technology, which doesn’t allow two-way communication between devices that would, say, allow for a password to be entered before a payment can be completed. While Visa and MasterCard have invested in their own mobile payment systems, the new venture, which includes Discover Financial Network and Barclays, will place phone carriers and smartphones at the center of a new financial network. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Financial Services, New Product or Service, Technology, Uncategorized | Tagged: mobile hotel key, mobile payment, Near Field Communication | Permalink
Posted by Doron Yaghoubi
12 August 10
How are you ensuring that your team members are building the skills they need to innovate? As you begin planning for 2011, consider how you’ll help your team of innovators accomplish their goals.
Take some time to map out your innovation objectives and challenges. What skills does your team need to learn? What companies can your team learn from? What are the challenges they need to overcome? Once you’ve delved into some of these important questions, you’ll have an idea of what you need to accomplish over the next year.
You can then outline how to make it happen. If your team is too inwardly-focused, what external best practices and innovations would you like everyone to know about and learn from? If your team struggles with bringing ideas to launch, they’ll need to learn how to better screen ideas and build out concepts.
Work with your learning and development departments to make the courses happen. You can facilitate the training course yourself, or turn to outside experts, but either way, build “learning” time into your plans for the next year. There’s nothing like a refresher course on creative problem solving to reignite stale innovation efforts and invigorate your team.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: strategic planning, learning and development, planning for innovation, creative problem solving | Permalink
Posted by Jenny Wang
6 August 10
Discover how Fortune 500 companies such as P&G, Unilever, Cisco, and AT&T have successfully integrated open innovation strategies to help them improve R&D and augment their business strategies. In a world where knowledge is widely distributed, organizations can no longer afford to simply look within their own walls for innovative ideas. Looking outward for new insights allows companies to dramatically increase their product innovation efforts, and shrink development cycles to a fraction of what they used to be.
World Research Group’s 2nd Annual Open Innovation Summit, to be held on August 11-13, 2010 at the Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago, will feature speakers from leading companies, including PepsiCo, Clorox and Johnson & Johnson, as well as workshops designed to help you overcome internal challenges to open innovation and arm you with the tools necessary to implement these strategies. Attendees will learn how to position their organizations as leaders in a revamped competitive landscape, build the business case for open innovation within their organizations, and leverage external assets to create new revenue streams. Besides a solid understanding of how open innovation has helped companies grow and adapt to new business ideologies, attendees will walk away with concrete and tactical plans to implement a successful open innovation strategy.
Check out this conference to network and share ideas with innovation, strategy, marketing R&D, product & brand development, and engineering managers from a variety of industries.
Futurethinktank followers will receive a $300 discount by registering for the summit with the coupon code: KGJ493
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Networking, Open Innovation Conference, World Research Group | Permalink
Posted by Doron Yaghoubi
5 August 10
The more we study the brain and evolution, the more we’re discovering that the idle brain is more likely to come up with new ideas. Yet we’re conditioned to be focused, efficient, and task-oriented. Yes, focus and efficiency are important in terms of executing ideas; but when it comes to ‘thinking the big thoughts’, it’s important to give your mind some time to rest and wander.
If you or your employees are charged with coming up with new ideas or strategies, be sure to schedule some idle time into your day or week. Not brainstorming time, not research time—but idle time. Leave yourself time to let your mind wander. Take a break from email and meetings and go take a walk. Mental breaks are important when it comes to being creative and opening up to new, fresh ideas.
There’s no special formula to follow. Some people take short breaks during a hectic day to decompress and think. Others take a couple of days each month; or a week or two each year. The duration of your idle time isn’t what’s important—the fact that you give yourself this time is.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: generating new ideas, Innovation Tip | Permalink
Posted by Jenny Wang
30 July 10
Is your company too big to innovate? For some organizations, size and structure can stifle employees’ creative spirits. That’s why many large organizations are turning to start-ups for training in innovation, agility, and how to think like an entrepreneur.
Here are a few lessons that the Fortune 500 can learn from the little guys:
1. Stay Close to Your Customers – Most great business stories start with an entrepreneur who passionately wants to solve a problem. Often, it’s a problem that the entrepreneur shares, so he knows his target customers intimately. As a company scales, senior managers interact with customers less frequently and often lose touch with their day-to-day needs. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: creativity, innovation culture, Rory Sutherland, start-ups | Permalink
Posted by Jenny Wang
20 July 10
Whether you are looking for innovations in technological developments or better business processes, seeking help outside of your organization in the form of contests has proven to be an effective way to discover new and novel ideas. Public challenges and contests have enjoyed a long history, from the Longitude Prize offered by the British government in the 18th century to persons who could discover a way to accurately measure Longitude, to the Netflix Prize which sought to improve the accuracy of user rating predictions. More recent challenges have come from GE, and NASA, which are both looking for innovations outside of their organizations.
GE recently launched a $200 Million open innovation challenge in which the company is calling on businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to come up with ideas on how to improve the next generation power grid. The contest focuses on three categories for submission: Creating an intelligent grid to better manage the volatile output of renewable energy sources, improving grid efficiency by anticipating and monitoring demand, and developing technologies that help homeowners use less energy in order to reduce the imbalance between energy supply and demand that can currently cause power production and distribution to short-circuit. GE and its partners have pledged to invest the prize money globally into promising startups and ideas, while a panel of judges will pick five winners and award each a $100,000 prize “to acknowledge these entries as examples of outstanding entrepreneurship and innovation”.
Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | New Strategic Partnership, Technology | Tagged: nasa, General electric, Public Innovation Contest | Permalink
Posted by Doron Yaghoubi
