decision making

The View from Singapore: Vision and Leadership in Conquering Innovation Fatigue

2 Comments / Asia, decision making, economic factors, government, leadership, licensing, management, miscellaneous, tech transfer / By

I just returned from an adventure in innovation and culture in one of the world’s most delightful and innovative nations, Singapore, where I spoke about innovation during Innovation and Enterprise Week 2009 sponsored by A*STAR, the government’s large program for the advancement of scientific technology and research. What remarkable vision is at play in this …

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Innovation and the Dangers of Bad Metrics: The Apple Analogy (The Fruit, Not the Electronics Company)

decision making, innovation, metrics, organizational fatigue / By

Innovation has often been killed by poor metrics, part of the innovation fatigue factor of flaws in judgment and vision. Poor metrics can include financial analysis that emphasizes short-term gains but overlooks the future. One way of illustrating the problem is with the “Apple Tree Analogy.” Imagine a fruit production company that is concerned with …

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Not Optimism, But Healthy Paranoia: A Key to Innovation Success

2 Comments / decision making, fatigue factors, healthy paranoia, innovation, leadership, risk, strategy / By

Shortly after I became Corporate Patent Strategist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation in 2001, I had the opportunity to address nearly several hundred people in the innovation community of K-C at a large internal technical conference held at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. My theme was “Healthy Paranoia” as the key to success in innovation. I drew …

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The Palm Pre: How a Focus on Short-Term Results Can Destroy the Fruits of Innovation

2 Comments / business models, decision making, economic factors, fatigue factors, networks, start-ups, will to share / By

As I began writing this post, my wife was in a car a thousand miles away with a brand new smart phone. I received a call on someone else’s phone informing me that my wife’s smart phone had quit working completely after following the instructions she received from tech support to fix the GPS system …

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The Downturn: This Is the Time to Invest in R&D/New Product Development

3 Comments / corporate, decision making, economic factors, innovation / By

An April 2009 report in the McKinsey newsletter, “R&D in the downturn: McKinsey Global Survey Results,” reveals that many leading companies are not shredding their R&D budgets. These companies view R&D and new product development as a source of competitive advantage. Where R&D is clearly important for future success, many companies are actually expanding their …

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“Fake Innovation”: Lessons from Fake Work

3 Comments / decision making, fatigue factors, innovation / By

Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder Than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem by Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan D. Nielson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009) strikes a chord in most anybody who has been in Corporate America – or most anybody who works, for that matter. Dr. Brent Peterson from the Marriott School of Engineering (Brigham Young University) and Gaylan Nielson, CEO of The Work Itself Group, apply decades of experience in facing the dysfunctions of modern business and diagnosing the problems of wasted effort. They estimate that over half of all work is meaningless, or “fake work”–work that is not related to the objectives of the business and does not help a business to survive. Fake. Meaningless. Wasted. These are terrible adjectives to apply to the exhausting efforts we go through, but they are accurate much of the time.

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