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

Organizing Rapid Opportunity Search

Product Innovation: New Product Types

Radical vs. Incremental Innovation

Noble Failure as Defined by Charles Schwab

Business Model: 6 Components

Building Strategic Alliances

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

Strategic Intent

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

Techniques for Fast Evaluation of Ideas and Decision Making

Using 80/20 Principle for Idea Evaluation

Corporate Guiding Principles

Best Practices: Charles Schwab

Idea Evaluation by Weighted Criteria

Idea Evaluation: 4×2 Perceptual Positions

6 Thinking Hats

3. Unleashing the Power of Improvisation

Leading the Innovation Team

Specific Attributes of Entrepreneurial Leaders

Nourish the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Create Hot Teams, Not Dull Teams

9 Roles of a Team Leader

The 10 Key Project Leader Skills

Leadership-Management Synergy

SuperLeadership

Inspirational Leadership: 10 Roles

Creative Leadership

Creative Leadership DOs and DON'Ts

How To Lead Creative People: 8 Creative Leadership Tips

Strategic Achievement

New Product Development by Cross-functional Teams

Attitude Motivation

Energizing People

Best Practices: Silicon Valley – The Fun Factor

Encouraging Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurial Creativity: Action Areas

Be Different and Make a Difference!

Entrepreneurial Creativity: 4 Intertwined Pillars

Creating a Culture of Questioning

Challenging Assumptions

Thinking Outside the Box

Tips for Adopting a Different Point of View

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

Take Risk!

From Noble Failures To Innovations

Turning Failures Into Opportunities

The Tao of Entrepreneurial Creativity

Facilitating Rapid Experimentation

Experimentation – The Key To Discovery

Preparing from Rapid Experimentation: 4 Steps

The Virtuous Circle of Experimentation

Learning SWOT Questions

Radical Innovation: Key Uncertainties

7 Challenges in Managing Radical Innovation

A Different Role of Prototyping

Keys to Successful Market Learning

Yin and Yang of the Jazz of Innovation

Sample Smart & Fast 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.)

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and much more!