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Co-Creation Science

The Key to Sustainable Growth: Building an Open Innovation Culture

A landmark report from The Judge Institute at Cambridge University, published in the Journal of Marketing, has finally proved something of unprecedented importance to all innovation professionals. Innovation success is not driven by innovation process, star hires, R&D spend, budget or even the country in which the company is based. In the study of 800 firms across 17 countries, company culture was the single greatest determinant of profitable innovation. Yet developing a culture of innovation, especially of radical innovation, is extremely challenging - perhaps nothing could be more challenging for an organisation, particularly those entrenched in conventional, risk-averse and hierarchical management practices. What is more, the usual costs associated with such a wholesale change management process are prohibatively high in this economy and risk alientaing staff. But there is another way...

Holidays really do help us innovate

Over the past several years scientists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but can change depending on the context. Change the context, say by going on holiday or to an art gallery for for the day, and you can increase creativity considerably.

The elusive ‘Ah-Ha’ moment accounts for 60% of all problem-solving

Research in the lab by Mark Beeman at Northwestern University, the founding fathers of neuroscience research into insight, shows that we tend to solve about 60% of problems with the 'Ah-Ha' phenomenon. And this is predicted to rise when people come out of the lab into the real world.

It’s not the loudest in the team that should get all the credit

When working as a team, it is usually the more confident and vocal people that seem to get the kudos for any successes. But a new approach perfected for the World Cup may offer a more nuanced way of seeing just who is contributing what.

Facebook keeps us honest

They say our friends keep us honest. Now it seems that our Facebook profile is an accurate source of information about a prospective collaborator, employee or partner.

Behind every successful innovator is a smart network.

People with eclectic networks are 3 times more innovative than those with predictable ones says a study at Stanford Business School. The more weak ties we nurture - no matter how much energy it might take - the more ideas we have. The more strange and bizarre the connections - even way outside our values system - the better.

The unconscious succeeds where the conscious fails

Do you trust the fabulous powerpoint presentation and the glowing numbers from the management consultants showing the potential profits of a new innovation they have dreamed up... or do you trust your intuition that the path leads elsewhere?

Keeping the grey hair around

Although it is tempting to dismiss the grey hair in an organization as having out-dated ideas about how to do business - and little idea of radical changes brought about by social media, open innovation and other new ways of doing things - we should be warned. Research within chimpanzees

Behavior spreads like wild fire in social networks

When one person at work starts to lose their creative edge - watch out. It could soon be you. That’s the lesson from a recent paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Forget the bonus. A bottle of wine works better in collaborations

It's a tough challenge - how do you reward people in a successful collaboration, when collaborators have different skills, responsibilities and agendas gauging how much 'effort' has been put in is tricky. A study recently published in Psychological Science has some answers.

Cosmopolitan companies are more profitable?

A new study reported in prestigious journal Science has shown that the more cosmopolitan a town is, the greater prosperity it has. Does this have major implications for how much we encourage our teams to go to meetings, engage in collaborations, and even spend time surfing Facebook?

Thinking digitally and ‘programming’ intuition

In a recent paper researching the actual act of intuiting within a number of oil industry CEOs (‘Lessons from “Good Minds”’) the researcher suggests that key to successful leverage of intuition by great leaders is the ‘programming’ of their unconscious intuitive mind through ongoing reflection on their experience - so that when they are asked to make a snap “gut” decision their sense organs

Open innovation and ‘kind learning’ cultures

A recent report in the academic press, “Intuition in Organizations: Implications for Strategic Management”, states that intuition can take time to manifest fully, and often needs an ‘incubation period’ - where other connections and serendipitous insights can emerge “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’’ (in the words of John Keats). It is difficult to “accommodate within organizational cultures that scorn fallibility and

Intuition, innovation and the bean counters

Intuition is still a taboo subject in business - even though great leaders often claim that it is key to great decision-making they do so only in their memoirs. For example, Ray Kroc’s decision to buy the McDonald’s logo and Akio Moriata (the inventor of the Sony Walkman) stating that ‘creativity requires something more than the processing of information. It requires human thought, spontaneous intuition and a lot of courage.” The reason for the persistent denigration of intuition is that it

Successful Intuition: The Rules of Thumb

Intuition is not the same as instinct and impulse (these last two are driven by our ‘animal’ brains, overwhelmed as they are by basic desires and fears). It is a talent that can - and must - be honed over time. Research into those with highly-developed domain expertise - such as fire-fighters and doctors - shows that their many past experiences

Intuition: Science’s Perfect Lie Detectector

Recent research reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology claims that of the two types of decision-making - intuitive and deliberative - the former is much more effective at helping people detect lying, deception and other untruths. This kind of effortless, spontaneous, and holistic reasoning is very powerful in leadership - particularly when

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