Ideas on Innovation

In our large-scale innovation sessions, we’ve led hundreds and even thousands of people through innovation experiences at major conferences, helping attendees invent, collaborate and learn powerful innovation strategies.

In our five years of work for this $70+ million charity, we’ve worked on countless innovation projects. In one project, we were asked how to boost public awareness of two diseases while driving fundraising.

The world’s most innovative companies run regular ideation sessions to fill their product and innovation pipelines. Ideation sessions can be extremely powerful, but only if they’re strategically designed.

A skunkworks team is a small, independent, and loosely structured unit within a larger organization, designed to develop marketable innovations without common interference from the larger organization. They can unlock incredible value, as history shows.

From The Second City to Saturday Night Live, improv is the art of getting on stage with almost nothing, and building an act on the fly. While improv is tied closely to theater and comedy, the skills developed through practicing improv can be incredibly valuable for innovation leaders.

Perhaps the single biggest barrier to innovation for many organizations is not devoting sufficient time to the effort. Fortunately, there are many ways organizations can successfully make space for innovation.