When your project has reached a decision point, do you really want to wait until the management team can assemble? Are you sure they will have time to get to your part of the agenda? You've probably been in a project that gets bounced from at least one meeting and has to wait. The key here is to remove senior management physically from the decision making process.    more »

This approach provides a simple way to compare the 'attractiveness' of different candidate projects.    more »

Innovation is like a sales funnel, you get prospects in one end and hopefully ‘sales’ out of the other end. The costs associated with generating concepts, clustering, evaluating etc. can be very significant and the business should really understand how these costs are spent throughout the process.   more »

The difficulty with trying to create purely formal processes for innovation is that you can lose the clichéd “water cooler” effect of accidental generation of ideas through chance discussions, meetings and exchanges of information. However, relying purely on your personnel to generate enough good new ideas is near suicidal for a business.   more »

Creating relaxed, informal areas for people to think and co-operate can have a dramatic effect on the quality and quantity of innovation in an organisation.    more »

If you want people to talk, you have to give them a fighting chance by putting them in relative proximity....There was some work done that showed that the probability of communication between two individuals was significantly lower if they were in different groups and decayed rapidly based on physical distance   more »

It is amazing to see people who work quite closely together using some form of instant messenger (IM) to talk to one another. Software developers seem to like this best – as if the fear of human contact might be too much for them. It’s got benefits.   more »

It’s actually a broader point but if you want to launch or support a top-priority initiative in an organisation, you have to put a top person on it.  If you just dig out someone because they are ‘available’ then you immediately send a signal to the rest of the personnel – it’s not really important!

 

Change hurts – so make it as quick and as clear as possible.

 

© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones

Relationships between companies have been changing for the last 10 years plus. Suppliers in car companies have moved from ‘Just In Time’ delivery of components (or Just In Trouble occasionally) to being made responsible for complete sub-systems of the cars. They no longer just   more »