You don't fail enough!

Failure is an essential part of innovation. A successful company:

• must be hedge failure—many risks should result in a reward, but if every "risk" succeeds you are not pushing any boundaries. If every
• take risks—if you fail because you didn't take risks your clients fled to the competition or substitute products. If you don't innovate you become a dinosaur.
• should accept failure—this point is very important, not just because of best practices for innovation. If you don't accept failure, employees are often fearful for their jobs and could try to coverup mistakes until they blow up. If you accept that even the best employees will fail, you can manage their projects better.
• learn from its failed projects and review them.

How do you innovate for value

Where does innovation add the most value?

Innovation that addresses an important problem or need adds the most value.

Identifying the importance of the problem that's being solved, if there's a sizable market for a solution, and whether the solution is good and marketable enough to be adopted. You'd be surprised how often that advice is NOT used by innovative companies.

S.M.A.R.T. design for S.T.U.P.I.D. users

This is a very interesting article about good design for users that are stressed, tired, untrained, passive, independent*, and/or distracted (S.T.U.P.I.D.).

How do we address this?

The cliffs note version is to make your design Simple, Memorable, "Accept Autopilot**," Recoverable, and Tested in real life situations.

The Proper Way to Brainstorm

Click on the image for some guidelines that will lead you to better brainstorming sessions:

There's a caveat—there is no "proper" way to brainstorm. These guidelines should be useful in most cases and you can use it to uncover the reasons why your organization can or can't brainstorm.


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