Contents

1. Balancing Order and Chaos

Creative Chaos and Improvisation Within a Guiding Structure

Creative Chaos Environment

The Tao of Value Innovation

Managing Innovation vs. Managing Operations

What Is More Important: Plan or Planning?

Best Practices: Dynamic Strategy Formulation by Silicon Valley Companies

The Jazz of Innovation: 11 Practice Tips

Loose-Tight Leadership

The Jazz of Innovation: Key Components

2. Creating a Guiding Structure

Defining Innovation Areas and Strategies

Systemic Approach to Innovation: 7 Interwoven Areas

Creating Cross-functional Teams

Launching a Crusade

Discovering Strategic Opportunities

Organizing Rapid Opportunity Search

Product Innovation: New Product Types

Radical vs. Incremental Innovation

Business Model: 6 Components

Building Strategic Alliances

Customer Partnership: Involving Customers as Co-innovators

Building an Innovation System

Corporate Innovation System: 5+1 Components

Creating a Culture for Innovation: 5 Strategies

Inspiring Culture

Best Practices: Building a Growth Culture as Dell Computers

Lessons from Jack Welch: Get Rid of Bureaucracy

Strategic Intent

Innovation Strategy: Road-mapping

Lessons from Jack Welch: Instill Confidence

Engaging Cross-functional Innovation Teams

Teamwork: The Keys To Team Success

Building a Team Culture: 10 Action Areas and Key Benefits

Managing Knowledge Workers

Innovation Process: Flexible Model

Milestone-based Thinking

Lessons from Silicon Valley Firms: Measuring Innovation

Fast Company

Owning Your Competitive Advantage

Setting Rules for Evaluation and Selection of Ideas

Managing the Flow of Ideas

Establishing Corporate Guiding Principles

The Scientific Method as a Model for Discovery

80/20 Strategic Thinking

6 Thinking Hats

3. Unleashing the Power of Improvisation

Leading the Innovation Team

Leadership-Management Synergy

Innovation Leader: Cross-functional Excellence

SuperLeadership

Lessons from Max DePree: How To Lead Creative People

Inspirational Leadership: 10 Roles

Creative Leadership

Specific Attributes of Entrepreneurial Leaders

Strategic Achievement

Lessons from Jack Welch: See Change as an Opportunity

New Product Development by Cross-functional Teams

Leading Systemic Innovation

Attitude Motivation

Lessons from Jack Welch: Stretch!

Energizing People

Best Practices: Silicon Valley – The Fun Factor

Lessons from Jack Welch: Make Business Fun

Encouraging Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurial Creativity: Action Areas

Entrepreneurial Creativity: 4 Intertwined Pillars

Creating a Culture of Questioning

Challenging Assumptions

Thinking Outside the Box

Tips for Adopting a Different Point of View

Entrepreneur: 10 Key Action Roles

Be Different and Make a Difference!

Turning Accidental Discoveries Into a Habit

Lessons from IDEO: New Product Design

The Tao of Intellectual Cross-pollination

Facilitating Cross-pollination of Ideas

Creative Problem Solving (CPS): Reframing

The Tao of Effective Brainstorming

Perfect Brainstorming: 10 Rules

Inventing New Products: 6 Thinking Tools

Freedom to Fail

Turning Failures Into Opportunities

The Tao of Entrepreneurial Creativity

Facilitating Rapid Experimentation

Experimentation – The Key To Discovery

Radical Innovation: Key Uncertainties

7 Challenges in Managing Radical Innovation

A Different Role of Prototyping

Keys to Successful Market Learning

The Tao of The Jazz of Innovation

 Sample Ten3 SMART Lessons (Slide + Executive Summary)

The Jazz of Innovation

To jazz up your ability to innovate, turn to jazz – create a clear guiding structure, establish a creative chaos environment within this structure to liberate people and trigger accidental discoveries, and encourage improvisation.

There is a clear structure to good jazz. Similarly, the flexible improvisation-driven model for innovation project management encourages improvisation within a guiding structure. In innovation, this structure is created through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes, systems and organizational charts. Strategic-planning and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation, experimentations, discoveries and innovation.

The "Inherent Sloppiness" of Innovation

Tom Peters researched many innovative companies and had been impressed in his researches by the "inherent sloppiness" of innovation. The "messy world", or the "creative chaos environment", is its "given precondition". The necessary solution has three parts, each one leading on to the next: experimentation, champions, and decentralized bands. To take advantage of that “inherent sloppiness” of innovation, managers must generate the right climate for creativity, experimentation, and individualism, and encourage iconoclasts and rule-breakers.

Case in Point: IDEO – Designed Chaos and Hands-Off Management

Fast Company magazine calls IDEO "the world's most celebrated design firm.“ When David Kelley began IDEO, he was determined to forego the structural demands of big corporations and refused to install a management hierarchy. His first order of business was to create an environment in which his workers would be happy and free to think creatively. Mostly, Kelley's style is hands-off, allowing employees to become their own bosses. At IDEO, there is no corporate hierarchy and no management structure. Employees are invited, not ordered, to attend meetings, and can also decide where they want to work and can tell the CEO what they really think of his ideas. Out of this chaos have come products that have made a deep impact on society. (Virtual Advisor Inc.)

Recommendations for Stimulating Innovative Idea Generation

• Establish the spirit of relentless growth in your organization.

• Create strategic intent, set stretch goals, emphasize a misfit between the current state and corporate aspirations, actively encourage the quest for new opportunities, and create and sustain strategic momentum for radical innovation.

• Establish innovation system for getting radical innovations out of the lab and into commercialization projects.

• Instill confidence, turn people loose and encourage outside-the-box thinking.

• Create an atmosphere where people are confident that how far and fast they move is constrained only by the limits of their creativity and drive and by their standards of personal excellence.

• Make business fun. As business today is about passion and winning and creating new things, fun must be a big element in the business strategy.

• Establish a creative chaos environment. Accidental discoveries are triggered by chaos and contradictions, rather than by order and logic.

• Involve everyone, show people that their ideas are valued, and make sure that it is the person with the best idea who wins.

• Reward author of innovative ideas. Rewarding idea generation motivates people, makes them feel important, drives participation, creates loyalty, delivers quality, recognizes value, and demonstrates management commitment to innovation.

• Create a questioning culture and encourage people to ask "Why?", "What If?" and searching questions continuously.

• Establish guiding principles for quick evaluation of a proposed new course of action and develop a receiving capacity for innovation so that creative people have a place to go with their radical ideas.

• Let people experiment with their ideas, allow the freedom to fail and try again – more intelligently.

... and much, much more!