Production Crisis Ideation

Situation  A client’s medical material was clinically successful but had not yet received FDA approval due to mounting production concerns regarding product quality.  The FDA had informed the client that without a successful next trial, they would not entertain...

New Platform Concept Ideation

Situation  A materials and chemicals client sought to take advantage of major natural resource and energy shortages that they could preferentially exploit commercially over the next five years and beyond.  The client specifically sought to either identify and develop...

Innovation Accelerant

The Challenge A major building materials manufacturer was looking to add new products and ideas to their development pipeline.  A majority of the client’s innovation resources had become a casualty of the housing recession. Once it was clear the downturn had abated...

Existing Platform Ideation

Situation  A client's key market had been declining by over 10% each year for the past six years. Although dominant in their field, technological changes, as well as new customer practices of doing business were slowly decreasing the need for the client’s core...

A Meaningful Life

As we open the New Year, 2017, I find myself both thankful yet yearning for more, especially more for my family, friends and colleagues. I’m blessed to have a three-time, three different cancer survivor for a wife – blessed that Robin is here, but also...

Corporate Innovation Fantasy

Has anyone ever read Arie de Gues' 1997 book The Living Company? That seminal work coupled with Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma says it all. Big companies for the most part still don't get innovation but claim to. After a zillion articles, Ted Talks,...

Cultivating Champions Cultivates Success

I've always loved the Caterpillar story. Last year's set of posts highlighting Ken Gray and Nathan Furr’s article on cultivating innovation from the inside highlighted Ken and his team’s efforts developing the 336E H hydraulic hybrid excavator. The focus...

EA White Paper : Adaptive Innovation

Adaptive Innovation An Introduction By Adam Malofsky, Ph.D. & Steven Levin Those who excel at anything in their lives have a way of making that effort, that interest, that passion become all pervasive and yet not all consuming in their lives. It's...

Edison, Jobs and The Innovation Lifestyle

Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison are rarely talked about in the same conversation or even the same sentence. Yet while over 125 years apart in general, the two men share a profound approach to innovation that we all can learn from today. Both followed the...

Embracing Innovation Uncertainty

A few days at NASA hanging with some of the world’s brightest reinvigorated my innovation passion. The collaborative discussions and debate affirmed a few powerful beliefs, principally those centered upon great ideas emerge and how one can institutionalize...

Innovation is a Lifestyle, not a Bunch of Metrics

A 2014 Forbes article on innovation metrics strongly implies that measuring activities is critical to success. Maybe. Maybe not so much. At least for the big stuff. Innovation activities simply for the sake of doing something without context and insight...