Gregg Fraley

Innovation Fundamentals for Leaders First of Seven Blogs Invest in Frameworks, But First, Establish a Culture Where Innovation Thrives Leaders — How Are You Doing With These Basics? Success is built on doing the basics well. For results, leaders need to foster innovation fundamentals and integrate them into organizational culture. More structure is needed as fundamentals take hold, and that means an innovation process framework. This series of posts on innovation fundamentals is not about frameworks. It’s about the cultural basics underlying them, and all innovation. Innovation has a lot of frameworks (and theories, methods, tools) that leaders can choose from, and you’ll want to choose. However, frameworks have built-in assumptions, such as, there’s motivation to innovate, and that the culture is aligned with an

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Why and How are Billions in Potential Innovation Left On The Table? Innovation is Fresh Combinations  What’s Needed: Sophisticated Tools to Deliberately Make Fresh Connections Across Domains (see MoshPit, a new offering from GFi). Fresh combinations of technologies, processes, materials, people, trends, concepts, and other factors are what creates innovation. From the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (chocolate plus peanut butter) to the iPod (MP3 player combined with a buying system, iTunes) nearly any innovation combines existing things or concepts. It’s interesting that large organizations with lots of intellectual property don’t systematically examine what they can combine to innovate. Maybe it’s because concept blends across very different domains are not intuitive. Deliberate concept blends, combinations, are not a defined part of

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The Innovation Imperative… growing innovation culture and capacity If you want an organization to survive, you must innovate. But innovation is more than survival, it’s the heart beat of an organization. What you make, what you do, and how you do it — is the lifeblood of who you are. Staying in business means reinventing as markets shift. In this inspirational speech Gregg Fraley answers the Why Innovation question, and informs as to what innovation means to you and your group. It advocates that innovation is an exciting part of everyone’s job, not “extra work.” The stories of great innovation moments, overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, and inventive breakthroughs will leave audiences empowered to innovate. The content is about how the

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Do You Wish To Accelerate Innovation? Get Training! When I step into a room to facilitate an innovation, strategy, or idea generation session I always find a great deal of energy. What I also often find is inexperience. Inexperience in: the kind of divergent thinking necessary to innovate, in specific meeting behaviors and facilitation skills, and in innovation process, approaches and frameworks Here are details regarding a half day Innovation Intensive course I’m conducting at Workspring in Chicago on October 27th, 2017. Energy, motivation, and inspiration are important factors in getting innovation rolling. But none of them, or all of them together, are enough to overcome untrained thinking, poor session facilitation, and an un-anchored or non-existent innovation approach. Your innovation

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Denver, Colorado — Innovation & Facilitation Training — Two Public Courses In late August I’m co-hosting and delivering two public courses on Innovation in Denver. Working with Kim Smoyer of Smoyer & Associates, a Colorado based consultancy that focuses on non-profits. My experience is mostly with corporate innovation, so, we’ve got perspectives and insights for both contexts. We’re holding the courses at the Community Resource Center (CRC) in downtown Denver. The first course is a one-day Innovation Intensive Overview, targeted for executives. It’s theory, practice, and how to get started, or improve your innovation process. If you take this course you’ll know why and how to move forward with results oriented innovation projects. The second course is a 2.5 day

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Does Any CEO Have the Luxury to Ignore Digital Transformation and Innovation? Gregg Fraley and Karen Kirby, copyright 2017 Innovation + Business + Technology = Digital Leadership Turnover of CEOs is already high, about 14.9 % a year as of 2016*. The demands of digital leadership and the enterprises of the future could dramatically accelerate that rate in the next few years. The conversation CEOs need to be having, to remain in the shrinking 85.1%, is about how to integrate digital technology and seize new pathways to industry leadership. In HBO’s Game of Thrones there has been that recurring foreboding phrase, “winter is coming.” For years, the phrase has been whispered in the ears of CEOs “digital is coming”. They

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Ben Tarnoff’s recent article for the Guardian hits hard. America has become so anti-innovation – it’s economic suicide This article is worth a careful reading. If you care about American Innovation, or UK Innovation for that matter, you’d better realize something; our governments are currently committing economic suicide. They are doing this by not investing in deep theoretical science and in infrastructure. Small “i” innovation is something we do well in the USA, but we can’t live on that kind of innovation forever. We need to create new markets and build new jobs based on new science and technology, new materials, and new infrastructure. This means countries like China, who are investing, are paving the way for their future success.

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What’s Really Needed is an Innovation MoshPit Reinventing Combinations, Concept Blends, and Mash-Ups I’ve been touting concept blends in innovation for some time. My reason is simple, it’s a fast path to new and different ideas. From the Printing Press to the iPhone, big new market-creating innovation happens when concepts from two different domains are combined. These Mash-Ups are not intuitive for most people to do and maybe that’s why some people try it and fail. Take heart, smart people can do concept blends with careful mental scaffolding. The key benefit to concept blends for organizations is finding breakthrough innovation. It’s my contention that a lot of breakthrough innovation is left on the table because not enough thinking work is

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A brief post to make sure you know about the upcoming Denver, CO public course in Advanced Innovation Facilitation.  This is a high value training. It’s partially sponsored so the price is much lower than usual. Here’s a page with details. It’s next week Starting Wednesday February 1, continuing on Feb 2, finishing at noon on Feb. 3rd. Essentially this is intensive, hands-on workshop that trains people in innovation frameworks, and tools for strategy, ideation, research, and project management. It’s being held at the Community Research Center and I’m working with CO local Kim Smoyer of Smoyer & Associates. It’s a course for innovation project managers, consultants, intrapreneurs, and entrepreneurs who want to have more productive strategy, idea generation, and

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Challenge Mapping & IdeaKeg Do you want to cut through the clutter when it comes to innovation strategy? Are you sorting through plans for year-end strategy and ideation sessions? Are you at the very front end of innovation and not sure where to go, where to start? Are you asking questions like these (you should be!): What projects might we get started before the end of the year? What might be our innovation focus for 2017? How might we leverage those research insights we’ve developed? What trends and ideas outside our industry might we adapt to innovate? These questions can be tough to sort out. I’m suggesting here two bits of “sorting out” technology. Consider using two powerful innovation and

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