All Features
Jason Furness
We all have problems in life, in business, everywhere. Many of us have “solving problems” as the key component of our daily roles. Management and any form of supervision only exist in order to help solve problems. If problems disappeared, a great many of the structures within our businesses and…
Stephen Ostroff
Since March 2015 it’s been my pleasure to serve as the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Acting Commissioner. The FDA has broad responsibilities, and I’d like to share some important accomplishments during 2015.
Tasked with overseeing products that account for about 20 cents of the consumer…
Gilles Hilary, Arnaud Lagarde
Eric (not his real name) was under pressure from his sales department. He was hesitant to close a large financing deal with a Chinese corporation but had little beyond his intuition to back up his position.
The company’s stock price had gained a whopping 600 percent in one year. Nevertheless,…
Ryan E. Day
No, they don't manufacture faucets, they don't run a major American airline, and they are not an elite special ops military unit. Headquartered in Taiwan, Delta Products Corp. is a global leader in switching power supply solutions, thermal management solutions, and DC brushless fans. Delta also…
Scott Berkun
The first industrial revolution may have been the most dramatic we will ever have. This is an unpopular notion because we suffer from what Tom Standage called “chronocentrism,” which is the belief that the present is the most amazing time ever in history, and our inventions will transform the…
Ryan E. Day
The words “plastic,” “polymers,” and “environmental responsibility” rarely bump consonants in the same sentence, but public sentiment and keen competition can nudge a company into exploring all kinds of plastic substitutes. Of course, a $160 price tag on a barrel of oil is also rather compelling.…
Harry Hertz
I feel like I should start this article with something like: “An innovator and a boss walk into a bar....” But I don’t have a punch line to follow it, so I’ll stick to the facts.
I recently read a blog post titled, “Think Like an Author, Not an Owner.” I felt the story should be more accurately…
Jeffrey Phillips
I’ve written before (and often) about how challenges with clarity and consistency introduce difficulties when corporations try to create new products and services. Notice that for a blog about innovation, I didn’t use the “I” word. That’s because I think corporations confuse the ends with the…
Healthcare reform has undoubtedly created more integrated delivery and payment models based on a culture of quality-focused and cost-efficient clinical management. In one example, many healthcare systems have begun implementing clinical co-management arrangements (“CCMAs”) to accomplish the…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In the early years of running my advertising business, I had my own clients, but I also freelanced for advertising agencies. This was before email, so I delivered my work in person. During those visits I ran into agency copywriters whom I knew, and usually one of them would say, “I wish I could be…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As a sort of character-building exercise, I recently opened an unsolicited email from my health insurance provider. I was intent on doing a quick purge of sham, spam, and flimflam, and I figured this one would be no different. But I also know I’m biased against health insurers, so I decided to set…
Jeffrey Phillips
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a leadership team that is considering building an innovation capability in their business. I was asked a question I get infrequently, but one I always enjoy answering. The question is this: “What keeps businesses from innovating effectively?”
The answer…
NIST
The prospect of a “hydrogen economy”—in which vehicles powered by fuel cells would travel the nation’s roadways emitting nothing from their tailpipes but wisps of water vapor—was making headlines 12 years ago.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush issued a challenge to…
Arun Hariharan
The ideas developed by your employees, partners, and distributors can be an important source of knowledge that, in many cases, proves quite relevant to your business.
However, I must admit that I had no clue as to how enormously important promoting a culture of ideas and innovation could be as a…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
A few years ago, a friend of mine returned from visiting her family in Greece. Knowing that I loved to try new wines, she brought me a bottle that she said was her parents’ favorite. She told me it was called retsina.
It was a white wine and I was anxious to try it. After letting it chill, I…
Ryan E. Day
“The experiments we’re undertaking today will lead to an all-new model of transportation and mobility within the next 10 years and beyond.” —Mark Fields, president and CEO, Ford Motor Co.
Mark Fields delivered those somewhat prophetic words at the official grand opening of Ford’s Research and…
Ryan E. Day
The fact is, we humans usually think much bigger than we can do. When that happens, collaborating to bring ideas to fruition becomes crucial for success. From that first time a woolly mammoth made a Neanderthal’s mouth water for a big juicy steak, humans have been working together to solve…
Akhilesh Gulati
In today’s world, it’s almost expected that product or service innovation will yield competitive advantage. So how does one innovate? One approach is to hire genius employees and to combine the attributes of a number of tools (e.g., theory of constraints or experimentation), or use specific…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
During the early 2000s, Allan Goldman, M.D., a chief physician at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s hospital in London, observed that too many mistakes were being made when patients were transferred from surgery to ICU. It seemed that no one person was specifically in charge of a…
Dawn Bailey
At a recent Boston University-hosted event, leading healthcare professionals pitched innovative ideas on how to solve the nation’s most pressing problems on a tight budget. Eight teams had two minutes to describe their innovation projects and their importance, as well as the project’s funding cost…
Matthew E. May
I get the question all the time, especially from organizations that have significant investment in some process improvement program—like a lean Six Sigma or lean kaizen initiative. (I hear the ghosts of Toyota engineers booing.) These companies have picked all the low-hanging fruit, squeezed as…
Bruce Hamilton
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.
Ford was not the first to build cars in an assembly line. Ransom Olds did that first in 1902, and Ford copied him. And,…
MIT News
The U.S. economy retains myriad sources of innovative capacity—but not enough of the innovations occurring in America today reach the marketplace, according to a major two-year MIT study.
The report, by MIT’s commission on Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), found that potentially…
NIST
The manufacturing workforce—so critical to manufacturing innovation—is the basic, yet decisive, building block for successfully implementing next-generation strategies. If manufacturers are to engineer innovation in their businesses, workforce-development investments must evolve from a one-off…
MIT News
You may have seen little squares of Tcho chocolate in their brightly colored wrappers decorated with futuristic parabolas of gold and silver. They’re easily found: Starbucks has sold them; Whole Foods sells them now.
Those usually aren’t the stores you visit to track down handcrafted chocolate…
