Group items tagged

“the curse of knowledge,”

Business success doesn’t necessarily go to those with the best product. It goes to whoever is the most persuasive.

Most business edges are found at the intersection of trust and simplicity.

Having no appetite for being wrong means you’ll only attempt things with high odds of working. And those things tend to be only slight variations on what you’re already doing, which themselves are things that, in a changing world, may soon be obsolete.

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

even though design thinking champions nonlinear thought processes, big companies often find themselves mired in the methodology’s suggested phases (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Ultimately this defeats the purpose, which is partly to build agility into the product-creation process.

The company’s version of design thinking centers around something it calls “the loop.” Visualized, the loop is an infinity symbol punctuated with four dots—the yellow dot representing the user, the green dots representing the various actions of “observe,” “reflect,” and “make.” Explained simply, the loop represents the entire product-creation process, beginning with user-centered research all the way through prototyping (“everything is a prototype!” says Hill), to building and launching a product.

loop becomes a loop when you realize that the iterative process is never actually done; perhaps the loop’s most important requirement is reflecting on what’s been created and constantly improving it.

And companies including Accenture, Boeing and Microsoft have created the Internet of Learning Consortium to speed up the production of job-ready workers by using the internet to teach them what they need to know.

“We talk about the days long gone when companies trained employees from the ground up and now we’re talking about companies training employees again. These organizations are saying [to the universities], ‘We need people with X, Y and Z skills and you’re not providing that.’ ”

While 96 percent of chief academic officers at higher-education institutions say they’re effectively preparing students for work, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agree

Faculty could react more nimbly to industry demands if their universities hired more of them and gave them the resources they need to update courses or offer them online

In addition to long waits for programs to be approved by faculty and accrediting agencies, for example, many schools can’t find enough people qualified to teach computer science. The increase in the number of tenure-track faculty in that and similar fields has been one-tenth as much as the increase in the number of students crowding into classes, the Computing Research Association reports.

The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, for example, is in the market for five or six new faculty hires per year in data, business analytics and other fast-growing disciplines, said Ash Soni, executive associate dean of academic programs. It usually manages to fill just two or three of those positions, Soni said.

“The pace of change and product cycles and skills demands in the economy are moving more quickly than traditional university processes and program development can keep up,” said Northeastern’s Gallagher.That needs to change, for universities’ own self-preservation, said Gordon, of Eastern Washington

“We’ve got to be at the leading edge of today and tomorrow,” he said, “rather than the day before.”

causes the most frustration among people who work inside innovation labs. These are hard working diligent people who understand how to apply lean startup methods and tools the right way. They often succeed in creating great products with good business models. However, when they are ready to take these products to scale they face resistance from their parent company.

The lesson learned is to not let the creation of an innovation lab lull you to sleep. You are not in a safe space. The parent company does not love you as much as you think it does. There is still a lot of work to do to get buy-in and support from leaders and key stakeholders.

idea that the leaders who funded the lab understand its purpose and support innovation

opening of the innovation lab itself often represents innovation theater - played out at the leadership level within the company

first symptom of this is the lack of a clear innovation strategy

to learn to see everything you choose to do (including, by the way, choosing to procrastinate on making a decision) as a choice not to do a million other things