What are you going to do this coming year to be more innovative? Innovative organizations deserve innovative leaders and members and if you’re not consciously thinking about how you might improve your own personal innovativeness, you’re abdicating on an important managerial responsibility.
Since this is the time for New Year’s resolutions, once again in the belief that organizations don’t innovate, people do, I have asked a group of highly innovative individuals who I admire to think aloud with the rest of us about how they will endeavor to become even more innovative in the upcoming year. This is the fourth rendition of these resolutions [earlier resolutions can be found at (2012 and 2013 and 2014]. What follows is a thoughtful selection of relatively global and certainly ambitious good advice, all of which has one overall objective: to make us all more innovative in 2015! In each instance, I have also included their twitter address so that each of the contributors can be followed throughout the year.
And so, without further ado, good innovating and good fortunes for 2015!
Abhijit Bhaduri: Blogger, social media influencer and a creative thinker, Abhijit is the Chief Learning Officer of
Estelle Métayer: founder and Principal of Competia, former McKinsey consultant and educator, corporate director/board member, painter, pilot and trend-spotter: My resolution is to increase my circle of knowledge and disrupt familiarity. This includes for example:
- attending at least one new innovative meeting (great list here ),
- learning about new fields ( such as the Inner working of the Brain, the Hatsune Miku phenomenon,
- organizing "walking meetings" with people from my network who work in industries I know nothing about
- subscribe to one unusual magazine (does not hurt to support the media industry...)
- connect with science journalists and science-fiction writers
- study street art movements @Competia
Shaun Coffey: experienced company director and Chief Executive of a variety of Australian & New Zealand private and public organizations There is a desperate need for better ways to make sense of the world. My enthusiasm for 2015 is to bring good quality critical thought to the public dialogue of the wicked problems we face. Most of these “debates” – covering diverse topics from GMOs to climate change to water to radicalism and violence to gender and racial inequality to poverty, disease and hunger – can be characterized as ideological positioning. I'll be slower to offer opinions, and more deliberate in crafting, explaining arguments and presenting ideas. I'll explore thought processes, challenge poor logic, and gather evidence more rigorously, so that ideas can be contested rather than ideologies narrowly protected. I will pay particular attention to views contrary to my own so that I can critically challenge my own ideas and positions. Most of all, I will share the experience, not just the conclusion. @ShaunCoffey
Steve Denning: @Forbes contributor, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace, formerly Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank My innovation resolution for 2015 is: to get firms to put customers first! That builds on my 2014 resolution which was: “to catalyze, reinforce and accelerate the coalition of thought leaders who embrace the ongoing economic phase change that is based on continuous innovation.”
During 2014, a study by Aspen Institute revealed that a majority of thought leaders canvassed did indeed believe that the primary purpose of the corporation is to serve customers' interests.
During 2015, I hope to nurture the transition among firms through a Learning Consortium. @stevedenning
Haydn Shaughnessy: author of the forthcoming “Shift: a User’s Guide to the New Economy” and c0-founder of The Disruption House. One of the major insights to come my way in 2014 was that noise now makes it almost impossible to find the right signals for change out there. I resolved already to stop being part of the noise and to curate my work more thoughtfully and to search for ways to connect it to other people who are creating the right signals. That's my most important resolution for 2015. @Haydn1701
Tim Kastelle: Teacher of innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School: I’ve got two things that I’m working on for 2015. At the front end of the innovation process, I am trying to improve the quality of ideas that I come up with by seeking out the voices of people that aren’t like me. It’s so easy to only pay attention to those with similar backgrounds and experiences, and I want to fight that easy habit. As someone who is both an academic in a business school, and also an experienced manager, I know the value of crossing boundaries. In 2015, I want to increase the number of boundaries that I’m straddling.
My second innovation goal in 2015 is at the other end of the innovation process – I want to focus more on the impact of my ideas. Too often, I find myself satisfied with coming up with clever ideas. But to change things in the ways that I want to, ideas aren’t enough. They also require action, and adoption. So next year, I want to try to ensure that my ideas do all the work they’re capable of – they need to have impact. @TimKastelle
Greg Satell: @Forbes contributor, publisher of digitaltonto.com blog, formerly holding strategy and innovation roles in
Sergio Monsalve: Silicon Valley VC — Partner, Norwest Venture Partners (&, full-disclosure, my son-in-law) To help me generate new ideas and different ways of thinking, once a day I reach out and talk to someone in my social network who I know may have the opposite view to mine in a specific current event or controversial subject, which I know that person is particularly interested in. While it is uncomfortable for some people to debate and disagree, if done in a friendly way I think it is a a key ingredient necessary to be innovative; I often see people get set in their ways and become too insular. Try to avoid that by reaching out and engaging in friendly debates to remain sharp in your thinking. @VCSerge
Bart Doorneweert: Value Chain Developer at LEI-Wageningen UR, and founder of Value Chain Generation Partnerships are kind of tucked away in the backend of the business model. However, I expect a lot from new partnerships this coming year. With investment capital being (treated as if it were) scarce and the dynamics in the global landscape, innovation will be high in demand regardless, and partnerships will be just the thing to feed the innovation machine. Personally, I will work on building new value networks, that can help take the partnership design tools I'm working on to the next level. @bartdoorneweert
Tania Dussey-Cavassini, Ambassador for Global Health, Vice-Director General of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. For 2015, I will continue to ask the questions that feed my daily musing: "Who will be my customer today? What added value will I bring? And How?" In order to come up with creative solutions to answer the "How" question, I will spend more time reading authors who grappled with philosophical questions, and spend 15 minutes every day practicing a new activity. @TaniaDussey
Alex Osterwalder, Co-Founder of Strategyzer and lead author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. Religiously apply the innovation tools we outline in our book Value Proposition Design (https://strategyzer.com/value-proposition-design) to minimize risks and optimize success chances. In other words, I will:
a) verify my most important assumptions about the future by designing experiments with the Test Card, then
b) capture my insights from those experiments with the Learning Card, and
c) track experiments and insights on the Progress Board until I have sufficient evidence that my innovations will succeed. @AlexOsterwalder
Christian Dussey, Ambassador, Director of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy: "Help shape conversations and collaboration on GCSP’s new platform, which will combine representatives from a wide range of discipline and sectors such as business, academia, the media, NGOs, international organisations, arts and sciences." @DusseyCh
Josie Gibson: co-founder of transformation venture, wheretofromhere? The top issue for 2015 will be leadership. In a recent World Economic Forum survey of global thought leaders, 86 per cent said we have a leadership crisis. We do. We see it in sluggish innovation rates, in poor enterprise productivity, in record low workforce engagement levels. Our default model is from the industrial era and is way overdue for an overhaul. We need leaders with vision and courage, with digital literacy and a strong sense of purpose. We need people comfortable with complexity, who understand the connected world we live in. What gives me hope is that in the work we do with large organisations in the Asia-Pacific, we see new leadership styles emerging with the emphasis on loose structures, rapid responses, self-organising teams and broad-based collaboration. It demands very different leadership skills. None of this should be surprising. Most of us realise that the only sustainable competitive advantage is people. The difference is that smart leaders are actually doing it, finding new ways to tap that huge pool of latent talent. @JosieJosieg
Paul Hobcraft; founder and Principal of Agility Innovation, who writes under paul4innovating, framing and discussing different issues around innovation’s understanding: I would like to see emerge a different ‘sustaining’ capacity built around innovation as the continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual innovation motion. A truly integrated innovation solution resolve let’s call this the Enterprise Innovation Platform that sits in our organization to allow innovation to be fully leveraged and exploited. Technology and the present digital revolution of mobility, social and big data demands greater connections, experiments and explorations. The growing need is having in place structures to connect people and things so we can successfully translate, share and manage these far more seamlessly. My resolution in 2015 is to further champion this and make this EIP a reality, recognized and valued as essential for the ongoing health of innovation. @paul4innovating
Ralph-Christian Ohr: Senior Consultant on Innovation Management with emphasis on energy, utilities and integrative innovation:My personal innovation resolution: take an integrative approach to managing innovation. Most discussions about exploration vs. exploitation, radical vs. incremental innovation, experimentation vs. processes, intuition vs. analysis, emergence vs. structure, push vs. pull, open vs. closed, long vs. short term etc. are misleading.
Sustainable innovation entails inherent tensions to be managed appropriately, depending on a company's particular innovation context.We therefore need to apply integrative and systemic thinking, rather than one-sided approaches, to foster successful innovation management in the new year ahead. @ralph_ohr
