→ The Jazz of Innovation: 11 Guiding Principles

→ Brainstorming: 10 Rules

Preparing Minds Through Business and Strategic Planning

Structure-building documents such as business plans and strategic plans are intended to provide an → innovator with a frame of reference and strategic alignment.

Business Planning. "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy," said Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke. Similarly, no business evolves according to its business plan. Business planning provides clarity of the business, helps you structure your thoughts, and provides a basis for  strategic thinking however. It is important that everyone involved in your effort has a clear understanding of your objectives. Anticipating the next stage of business growth, and planning for it, can help to minimize the surprises your business will face. "Surprises can be great for birthdays, but potentially fatal for businesses."  → Surprise To Win

Strategic Planning. "Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions," advised → Peter Drucker. Strategy should be dynamic and change constantly in order to contend with external turbulences. Strategic-planning process cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of → creative insight, but it can increase the odds that they occur and are pursued. A successful strategy process helps your company to react quicker to emerging → opportunities and make faster decisions than your competitors do. It ensures that your → corporate leaders have a strong grasp of the strategic context they operate in before the unpredictable but inevitable twists and turns of your business push them to make critical decisions in real time.

New Product Development Strategies. If you develop new products, especially new-to-the-world products, any forecasts will be wrong as new technologies and products unfold in ways that nobody can imagine. For new product and technologies, business strategies emerge during experimentations as a probe-and-learn process. It's really a "Ready – Fire – Aim", not a "Ready – Aim – Fire" process. It's a → jazz improvisation: the drive to capitalize on entrepreneurial opportunity need to be combined with sound strategic thinking.

Simulation Game "Innovation Football"

Innovation Football (Innoball) is a breakthrough simulation game that helps innovators achieve great success in the real world.

Innoball helps you:

• Develop much stronger business strategies and → business model

• Enhance → entrepreneurial skills of the innovation team

• Select the best → leader and players for the innovation team

• Select the most promising innovation projects to invest in.  >>>

Kore 10 Innovative Thinking Tools

Kore 10 metaphoric tools are relevant and rich metaphors for the kind of things we work on when we need to invent new things, anticipate opponents' moves, design an innovative strategy, and to find a → creative solutions to complex problem.

Having created the set of Kore 10 Metaphoric Tools, I fine-tuned it on both our own innovative projects and in collaboration with my trainees, clients and partners. Every application of the Kore 10 Metaphoric Tools produced truly insightful, inspiring and empowering results... More