Posts by Jesse Nieminen
The Fallacy of the Aha Moment & Overnight Success in Innovation
We’ve all heard the story of Newton and the apple. According to the legend, he came up with the theory of gravity when he was sitting under a tree and an apple fell on his head, at which point it all suddenly dawned on him. We love to hear stories of these great aha moments.…
Read MoreBusiness Model Innovation – The What, Why, and How
In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of business model innovation – and for good reason. Technology has made it easier than ever to adopt a wide variety of novel business models effectively. At the same time, increased pace of innovation and global competition has made differentiation more important than ever.…
Read MoreWhen tough times are ahead, you should double down on innovation
As I’m writing this, the last couple of weeks have been quite eventful around the world. There’s a lot of uncertainty and even panic regarding the coronavirus, its current and potential impact on our economy, and of course, its effects on people all around the world. As a result, we’re seeing more and more action…
Read MoreWhy Is Innovation So Important for Businesses?
Even in our line of work, we often meet people who aren’t very familiar with innovation. As such, we often get to answer the question of what exactly innovation in business is, and why businesses should care about it. Given how vaguely the term innovation is used, that is hardly surprising. Also, while we’ve seen…
Read MoreThe Flywheel of Growth – A Strategic Innovation Framework
These days virtually everyone agrees that innovation is strategically important. For example, in an international PwC innovation survey of roughly 250 CEOs, only 3% said that innovation is not a strategic priority for them. Regardless of these results, organizations often struggle in aligning their innovation efforts with their overall strategy. On the other hand, top performing innovators always seem…
Read MoreWhat Is an Innovation Manager – And How Do You Become a Great One?
In the last few months, I’ve had a few readers ask me how they could become an innovation manager, as well as how they could succeed in that role. So, I thought I’d give my take on what an innovation manager actually does, how to become one, and how to be good at the job.…
Read MoreInnovation is Not Supposed to be Fun
Gary Pisano, a Harvard Business School Professor, wrote an excellent article in HBR last year on the hard realities of what innovative company cultures actually look like, which I highly recommend every aspiring innovator to read. The bottom line? The inspiring and comfortable attributes, such as freedom, low hierarchy, and tolerance for failure that are associated with innovative company…
Read MoreBreakthrough Innovation – What Are They, and How Do You Create One?
We’ve recently been breaking down the different types of innovations and explaining their differences in a series of previous articles. This time, we’re looking at breakthrough innovation. It’s a commonly used term, and just like most other innovation terminology, there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus on what the word means. Still, more and more startups…
Read More25 of the Best Books for Innovators
Regardless of which stats you look at or believe, innovation is without a doubt difficult. Thus, if you’re looking to succeed in it, you need to invest heavily into continuous learning. There are, fortunately, plenty of great books out there that can help you succeed in innovation, in 2020 and beyond. I actually wrote a list of some of…
Read MoreThe Zero Challenge – Becoming Climate Neutral
The topic of this post is a bit different from what I write about, but just as important. For as long as humanity’s been around, innovators have always been creating the future. As a result, we’ve made tremendous progress and changed our world for the better in so many ways. However, these innovations have also…
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