Abundance Hinders Innovation

An intrapreneur can be defined as someone who thinks like an entrepreneur but brings their ideas to the company where they are employed instead of launching their own business. 

Instate a "no idea is a bad idea" policy, gather the support your employees need to try out their ideas and let them pitch decision-makers at your company.

This allows employees to spend 15 % of their paid work time daydreaming, doodling or experimenting with ideas that don’t necessarily have to do with their work at the company.

This kind of daydreaming is the genesis of invention and fosters passion for one’s work.

We often start habits and drop them a few days later. To combat this, you can use triggers to remind you to practice the habit. Examples of triggers:

• Reading at the same time everyday will prime your brain to automatically trigger itself to begin reading.
• Leaving your books in places you will easily see is another trigger. If you read books digitally you could pin your tab so it’s always in your visual perspective.

Studies indicate that the Zeigarnik Effect is real. It says you are more likely to recall uncompleted tasks than completed ones.

Knowing this pattern of our brains, we can trick it by forcing cliffhangers when we’re reading books. It’s hard to stop reading in the most interesting part but it will make you want to start reading again.

Set aside time to tackle a problem and then use the entire time. Don't head for the door after the first good idea, as there may be bigger and better ideas to come.

Bring facilitation techniques to encourage participation.

By giving team members time and resources to grow, learn, and explore you get a better quality and wider brainstorming. 

A leader with clarity of conscience and a readiness to speak up can make a difference, and contribute to the greater good of humanity.

Cultural change can be made possible even if a middle-level or lower-level manager puts together a radical vision and gathers momentum from his peers.

Taking challenges continuously, big or small, contributes to your 'challenge taking' skill-building, preparing you for bigger milestones in the future.

The skills that are built, eventually operate in different areas, sometimes in unplanned and unanticipated situations. 

Extensive Data studies have found a link between the health of an organization and its performance.

Robust health is crucial to an organization's long term success.

Companies aligned with one of these four organizational recipes are more likely to be healthy and to deliver strong, sustained performance than those following random management styles:

• Leader Driven
• Market Focused
• Execution Expertise
• Talent and Knowledge-based

1. Risk-taking. Create a culture in which risk-taking is encouraged. Fear of failure is one of the most common inhibitors of innovation. 
2. Increase learning agility. People with a high learning agility are able to take feedback and adjust strategies accordingly, without becoming discouraged. 
3. Creating cross-functional teams. Organise teams with different skill sets together on an ad hoc basis to tackle particular projects. It creates a smaller pool of decision-makers and allows the team to benefit from cross-departmental knowledge.

New research suggests that managers can innovate better by embracing and working with constraints, instead of viewing them as a hindrance to innovation.

When there are no challenges in the creative process, complacency comes in, and people tend to go for the most intuitive and easy ideas rather than investing in the development of better but difficult to implement ideas.

• Hackathons generate actionable ideas, strategic product concepts and process improvements.
• Internal hackathons –organized within a company — provide a great way to inspire teams and promote creativity, collaboration, and innovative thinking.
• If run properly, hackathons can establish a stream of valuable ideas.
• The gamification layer on top of hackathons can further motivate and reward employees for being innovative while staying aligned with the strategy of the corporation.

The most important though from a developer’s point of view is resources and sponsorship to drive the product/idea to the next stage. This could be the most inspiring award of all — the winners ability to use specialized resources (developers, equipment, software, services) — according to a suitable plan — and get prepared for a formal presentation of the outcome to the senior stakeholders, leaders and decision makers. 

Several companies design flexible structures and processes to cope with the unexpected. Uncertainty presents not only a challenge but also a potential opportunity.

• The company, Haier, developed a 'platform ecosystem' where employees can present their ideas to an investment committee.
• They also developed a digital ecosystem around users where the user is the core.
• A culture of innovation is encouraged by rewarding autonomous decision-making and encouraging employee teams to find external partners to develop ideas.
• Other companies focus on coffee trials, where you are randomly paired up with other employees over lunch.

It's a challenge to surrender numerous good ideas that can be innovated and improved. This is where the don't-do list come to play. In order to develop, test, pilot and revise an idea, loads of propositions must be dropped.

The challenge is to be tough enough to do the pruning so that the survivors have a chance of being implemented properly and reaching their full potential,

"Only the masters of renunciation leave an imprint, only those who can say a hundred Nos for the sake of an overwhelming Yes."

 - David Brooks.

Your energy disappears and nothing really happens.

It is a reminder for you to close those options. And starts focusing on something that will affect and move you towards success. Otherwise, you spread yourself thin. You dissipate your energies and never put full force behind any cause.