Lina Atkinson / Home

I attended a ‘brainstorm ‘ session this week. Yes I know brainstorming doesn’t work – well not for everyone…unless really well facilitated.

But I was asked to attend, and I thought I would learn something.

What I did learn is that you need better direction in group sessions.

Here are five basic rules:

1. Criticise nothing

2. Go for large quantities of ideas

3. Encourage freewheeling, wild, even apparently nutty ideas

4. Build on ideas

5. Stay focused on the task

Do you really need to go to the moon…or do you need wheels on luggage?

I come across many people who have no idea what think do, because they have no idea what innovation management is.  It is very easy when you work with something day in, day out to become complacent that everyone knows and understands what you do, when in fact, outside of large organisations and the innovation industry, I find that “innovation management” requires some explanation. 

Put simply innovation management is the process of managing innovation.  OK, you can see what I did there.  I took similar words … continue reading

We have already done a lot of work in the area of idea creation (and wrote a best seller on the subject with Tina Catling) so I was really interested in why some ideas make money and some don’t. It seemed at first there was very little correlation between how good the idea was and how successful it becomes. The subject is well documented, mostly in universities…but it’s important to us all. So here’s a quick summary of the current consensus of opinion.

If you want to look … continue reading

Brands frequently talk about differentiation; that prized nugget that separates them out from their competitors.

One of the most talked about differentiators is customer experience, yet so many organisations fail to approach it head on because they can’t quite work out how to create great customer experience as a culture. 

There are a number of ways to provide a great customer experience and one of the most powerful is through your people.

But many organisations continue to overlook the s… continue reading