KevinMcFarthing's blog

It’s a common call – we want more innovation, disruptive innovation, new options.  We need to think outside the box.

Ideas are the problem.  I suspect many of you have heard this statement as often as I have.  It’s usually translated as “we don’t have enough ideas”.  Yet when you dig beneath the surface, you

The concept of the ambidextrous organization is gaining traction.  It describes companies who can innovate in the current business at the same time as creating new business options for the future.  This is achieved through:

Apologies in advance if any of the content in this article offends political sensitivities and affiliations; it’s certainly not the intention.  Judging by the press and social media, to most people in the UK and probably in Europe as a whole, it appears that the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA is beyond surprising.  But digging beneath the shock, and of course looking from the outside, there are lessons to learn for innovators.

This is the first of two articles on setting targets for creativity.  The topic of part 1 is why targets should be set; part 2 deals with how to set them.

As Oscar Wilde said, “We are all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the stars”.  To me this phrase says a lot about ambition.  It starts with a vision, a dream, an inspiring view of where we want to be in the future.  Of course the bit about being in the gutter is a bit dramatic; suffice to say that many companies are in si

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, as a result of some intensive consultancy projects and some personal time.  Now that I’m back, refreshed and raring to go, the first thing that struck me was the analogy to innovation itself.  It’s easy for companies to be distracted and take the eye off innovation.  In many cases, it does indeed

I'm always happy to collaborate with partners who stimulate interaction and learning in innovation. One such event coming up in June is the Innovation Exchange: Chemical & FMCG conference. You can find more details below from Yiota Andreou of Marcus Evans.

When I was growing up in the UK of the 1970s, there was a TV game show called The Golden Shot. The final part involved a member of the audience guiding a blindfolded cameraman to line the crossbow sights up to the bullseye. “Left a bit, right a bit, up, down a bit – FIRE”. If they were lucky, the bolt would hit the middle of the target and they would win a prize.

Innovation should always have a target.....

Experience is what you get just after you needed it.  Or so the saying goes, suggesting that if only you had known beforehand what you learn afterwards, you would have avoided mistakes and achieved a better result.  That’s largely true (in my experience!) but it isn’t a blanket statement that’s applicable in all cases.

Recently I went to the Financial Times’ FTInnovate conference in London. The conference theme was “Big vs small: which one is better?” The conference chair freely admitted that the intention was to provoke debate, not to have a fundamentalist binary position with only one right answer. And there was a lot of good discussion and debate.

Open Innovation is now widely recognized as a way to enhance options for innovation by accessing external assets. However it can mean many things to many people; from running a crowdsourced idea scheme like Lego Ideas or MyStarbucksIdea, through to large co-branded initiatives like Senseo.

In the middle of this spectrum lie Open Innovation joint development projects. Put simply, these are projects where two or more companies work together to launch a product or service, usually exploited in the market place by one of the partners. But these can take many forms.

One of my favourite definitions of innovation comes from Andrew Hargadon – it’s about making the possible desirable and the desirable possible. It neatly encapsulates supply and demand, implying that it’s something the customer wants and the innovator can deliver. It’s where problem and solution meet.

It is generally accepted that innovation involves risk. In the more enlightened organizations it is also clear that failure should be accepted as a consequence of playing the innovation game. It’s a bit like sport. You can’t win all the time, but it doesn’t mean that you change the whole team if you lose one game. Equally, embracing failure is going too far.

Very few management systems or initiatives start with a blank sheet of paper.  Every sizeable company already has ways of managing supply, quality, finance etc – and innovation.  When the realisation comes that innovation needs to be strengthened, the temptation is often to import a system that will solve all your problems.