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Andy Grove, Former President of Intel, used to arrive at work at 8am and left by 6pm every day. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, leaves the office by 5.30pm everyday so she can have dinner with her kids at 6pm. If you are struggling to fit in a productive day’s work and shut down yourRead more

Eighteen months ago, I made the decision to fire all of my company’s managers. By “fire,” I mean remove their management responsibilities and instead, have them focus their efforts on actually doing the work they were originally hired to do (which in Inventium‘s case, is innovation consulting) rather than spend countless hours managing people. Many companiesRead more

I read a LOT of books. I am also known to frequently give people book recommendations (whether they want them or not). In my opinion, books are the most cost-effective way to get a significant improvement in anything, really. Sadly, reading tends to fall way down on people’s priority lists these days (certainly well behind checking one’s FacebookRead more

Innovation is a word at the tip of almost every CEO’s lips. However, despite the best of intentions, many organisations are killing innovation. There are several issues that these organisations have in common.   Leaders don’t walk the talk While the majority of CEOs and their leadership teams talk about innovation, many unfortunately don’t doRead more

Organisational innovation has typically been the domain of marketing and R&D departments. However, considerable research has been conducted that suggests it is actually the HR department that can have the greatest impact on organisational innovation. Despite ‘organisational innovation’ being a buzz word from the 1890s that seems to have had a large degree of stayingRead more

Creative managers know that if you approach a challenge knowing nothing, you’re likely to come up with a solution that is different and original. Most of us are brought up to believe that failure should be avoided and that it is the opposite of success. Certainly, that’s what the dictionary definition says. But in theRead more

So, in my spare time last year, I decided to write my second book. It’s called The Innovation Formula and the wonderful folk at Wiley are publishing it. It will be appearing in all good (and even the not so good) book stores on April 1. No, this is not an April Fool’s joke. TheRead more

We have spent the last few months geeking out over the tens of thousands of data points we get to analyse for the BRW Most Innovative companies list. And today (well, technically last night in our inaugural awards night), we can finally reveal who Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Companies are for 2015. A massive congratulations to theRead more

During my time at Inventium, one thing I have heard pretty consistently, is that financial rewards can be an innovation culture killer. A lot of the psychology literature on innovation addresses the difference between intrinsic motivations and extrinsic rewards. While anecdotally, it seems to make sense that financial rewards are the best way to motivateRead more

At Inventium, one of the methodologies we use in the back end/implementation part of the innovation process is Lean Startup Methodology. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a New York Times best-selling book that was first published in 2011. Having worked on countless innovation projects, it has become clear to me that more oftenRead more