Over Thanksgiving we got our puzzle board out for a jigsaw puzzle. This time it was a Wasgij (jigsaw in reverse). A puzzle where you get a few hints, but don’t know the picture you are putting together. It occurred to me, that there is a lot of resemblance between putting together the unknown in […]
On our T4 training platform, we can see how teams progress by the answers they provide. One of the teams did not show any progress. So – in my role as their trainer – I reached out and asked what was going on. It turned out, the team had read all the materials, but just […]
IBM once featured a campaign around “the innovation man”. Stop talking, start doing was the main theme of these advertisements. Last week, while visiting several companies in the Netherlands, this theme seemed still very relevant. However, how do you start doing? And does that mean that you should stop talking?
Learning by doing sounds easy, however, it requires preparation, guts, and practice to make it work. In an innovation project, there are many occasions that learning while doing is the only option. Years of schooling have taught us how to learn before doing, in the process, many of us have lost the ability to learn […]
In the various entrepreneurship and innovation programs I am involved with, Customer Discovery is always a key activity. While it may sound simple, in practice it is not. Interviewing users and potential clients about their needs and desires is challenging for startups and established organizations, yet, for different reasons. Below customer discovery tips and tricks […]
Overconfidence drives poor decisions. We humans, tend to focus on the evidence for outcomes that we believe and want to happen, while ignoring other possibilities. As a result, overconfidence is the biggest pitfall when it comes to bringing an innovative idea to practice. Now, research has shown an effective strategy to avoid overconfidence: focus on […]