FIRE
How To Use A Stage Gate Funding Model To Create Your Innovation
My motto throughout my career has been “Ideas without execution are a hobby, and I’m not in the hobby business.” Execution is a risk; it requires commitment, money, and manpower; but there’s no point going through the process of ideation if you’re not going to do anything with the end result. In the
Pitch Your Best Idea
The next stage is to consider how these ideas might be implemented by your organization. Step one is to think about how to pitch your best idea. Look at the top ideas and say to yourself as the leader, “These are great ideas—how can we execute them?” The following questions will help you get to […]
Idea Ranking
Once you’ve generated your ideas the next step is idea ranking to determine the potential to become innovations. So, how do you decide which ideas to work on? The typical innovation process leaves that decision to the senior-level managers, which seems like a logical choice. They’re senior, so they
Ideation
The Killer Questions are used in the Ideation phase of FIRE. The point of the Killer Questions is to keep you focused on a specific facet of your organization, your customer, your product, or your operations, but at the same time keep your search for ideas expansive within that area. The Killer Ques
How Does FIRE Fix The Innovation Gap?
The main challenges that all organizations face are what I call the innovation gap and the innovation delay. The innovation gap is the difference between the need for really great ideas and the actual supply of them. The innovation delay refers to how long it takes you to go from selecting an idea f
Focus Your Search For Better Ideas
The first stage of FIRE, Focus, is about doing a thorough but organized search, so you don’t inadvertently ignore a critical area of discovery. Successful innovation is the translation of better ideas into something, such as a product, that is real. If you are focused in your approach, you will be a
Creating Innovations in Education
My objective for the workshop was to test the Killer Questions before handing them off to the Department of Education. Remember, the focus for the attendees of the workshop was how to create innovations in education to better prepare our students for the competitive workforce. I gave them the modifi
Who Is The Driving Force Behind Creative Change?
There are so many stories of important innovations arising from serendipity, sudden bursts of inspiration, and lone geniuses going from idea to execution in their garages. In reality, though, innovation isn’t a magical process: sudden bursts of inspiration can certainly be important, but it takes a
Video of the book launch event at the Computer History Museum
Last Thursday I had the great pleasure of being the guest of John Hollar at the Computer History Museum for an hour-long discussion on my book Beyond the Obvious. This was the book launch event that kicked off the book tour. One of the greatest challenges of writing the book was eliminating so much
Inviting you to hear it first. Announcing my new book, “Beyond The Obvious”
I’m thrilled to say I’ve just wrapped up the manuscript to my first book, Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation, published by Hyperion and due on the shelf February 7, 2012. The crux of the book is about generating ideas that lead to breakthrough innovations. Why
