The Book for Innovation Leaders
Read how to empower your teams to innovate faster and more efficiently
Discover how to transform your company into an agile, innovative organization.
The Innovation Mode provides a holistic view of innovation – covering the role of people, culture, technology, and processes. Innovation is seen as a fully integrated function that is powered by people and streamlined by technology.
“Very practical and inspirational for executives, leaders, middle-level managers, and teams willing to transform their vision to actual execution. Must-read and must-use to convert the team and organization to a never-ending innovation mode.”
— Achilleas Stergioulis, Director at INTRASOFT International
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read for innovation managers, top-level corporate executives, and entrepreneurs!”
— A. Tzoumas, CTO, SciFY.org
“A tribute to innovation and its transformative power, an inspiring journey through innovation's known and unknown aspects.”
— Alex Papageorgiou, Analytics Expert, ex-Googler
“In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the ‘Innovation Mode’ is an important read for any organization.”
— Brook Perry, Director of Marketing at ‘nuffsaid
“A practical guide for how to tap your organization's creative energy, and transform it into an innovation-driven pace-setter.”
— Bart Manning, Head of Sales & Business Development, Unity
Chapter Summaries
1. Innovation (re) Defined
Innovation is an overused term. The book examines the meaning of the term ‘innovation’ from various standpoints and explains its relationship with novelty and invention. It presents how innovation can be classified based on its purpose, intensity, and style and introduces new definitions to describe innovation as it happens –seen from within the corporation.
2. The Culture of Innovation
A healthy culture is one of the most crucial success factors for corporate innovation. The book defines the innovation culture and presents its core values, namely trust, safety, openness, purposefulness, curiosity, and healthy competition. It explains how they set the basis for the formation of a collective innovation mindset, and then presents the most frequent blockers.
3. Fixing the Culture
Improving the culture of innovation is not easy as it usually reflects the organizational structure and attitude, the leadership style along with certain perceptions and established behaviors. The book provides guidance on how to bootstrap the cultural transformation through a series of small, inexpensive improvements targeting typical innovation blockers such as bureaucracy.
4. A Framework for Innovation
Innovative corporations are distinguished by their enhanced ability to listen to the market, spot problems worth solving and respond fast, by pursuing validated ideas and innovation opportunities. The book introduces the Innovation Framework as a set of foundational capabilities that empower the organization to enter this continuous innovation mode.
5. A Universal Model for Ideas
Ideas are essential resources for the Innovation Function. To be effective, though, ideas need solid articulation, based on a flexible, standardized model. This book introduces the Universal Idea Model as a unified way to capture business ideas and explains how it can be used as the basis of a Graph of semantically connected ideas - a new form of knowledge for the organization.
6. Managing Ideas at Scale
The ability of the organization to properly handle business ideas (spot the high-potential ones and act upon) can bring competitive advantages and opportunities for differentiation. The book introduces an agile approach in idea management – a process that treats ideas as everlasting, reusable innovation assets. It also presents a scoring model for assessing ideas.
7. The Always-On Idea Channel
In truly innovative organizations, people are encouraged to submit ideas at any time. Innovation Consumers discover ideas, just-in-time in alignment with their agenda. The book introduces a blueprint of a modern Ideation Channel and describes how advanced technologies such as NLP and AI can make ideation more efficient and impactful.
8. Ideation and Brainstorming
This chapter provides practical guidance on how to host effective and productive brainstorming sessions. It describes the typical brainstorming format used in business environments and then proposes an enhanced version powered by the Always-On Ideas Channel. It also introduces the Data-Driven Brainstorming, which instead of a problem it is guided by interesting data patterns.
9. Organizing Hackathons
A series of well-organized corporate Hackathons enrich the stream of ideas within the organization and bring significant cultural improvement. This chapter presents the options and provides guidance and best practices on how to define and run great Hackathons in a streamlined fashion. It explains how to make them more inclusive and describes how to measure success.
10. From Business Ideas to Opportunities
The ability of an organization to efficiently validate ideas is a success factor for innovation. This chapter introduces the notion of Rapid Prototyping and presents the Makerspace as the base for ad-hoc experimentation initiatives. It describes the concept of the Prototype Factory as a streamlined, concept development and validation service.
11. From Opportunities to Products
Agile engineering brings a major change in how companies build digital products and services, through a fast, adaptive, continual improvement process that naturally supports the exploration and testing of new ideas. This chapter explains how innovation and agile product development interlink and introduces the agile way of developing products.
12. Measuring Innovation Performance
Measuring corporate innovation is not straightforward. This chapter introduces an analytical framework enabling consistent and accurate measurement of Innovation performance. With this framework, corporate leaders obtain instant insights on the current state of the Innovation Function through a single Performance Scorecard of just five scores.
13. The Innovation Transformation Program
Innovation Transformation programs are complex as they attempt to bring multiple changes across the layers and the foundations of the organization. This chapter assembles all the workstreams, projects, communication initiatives and events into a single plan. It explains how to design and execute an ambitious transformation program, that allows starting ‘small’ but also iterating fast, in an agile way. Every iteration enhances the innovation capability of the organization, improves its culture and measures the impact and the progress of the program.
The Innovation Dream Team - the essential roles and skills that define the core of the innovation program
