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How Iteration-itis Kills Good Ideas

Harvard Business Review

Instead, there was a problem with the process that an idea generator had to go through before they stood in front of senior leadership. The idea generator had to show the idea to their line manager. Maybe even to one or two members of leadership. And screened. And debated. And re-jiggered.

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Taming Your Company's Most Elusive Beast

Harvard Business Review

R&D investments have been made, stage/gate processes have been built, creativity training courses have been run, and yet the outputs — exciting new products and services — don't seem to be falling into place. Consider, for example, the UK software company, Red Gate. None of them involve idea-generation schemes.

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Putting Humans at the Center of Health Care Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Leadership and teams find it hard to come together to scope and resource projects appropriately as well as put projects on the shelf (or kill them) when needed. Scoping projects for success and managing ambition: Interdisciplinary design teams are, by nature, optimistic and ambitious. Acknowledgements.

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What Big Companies Get Wrong About Innovation Metrics

Harvard Business Review

The five most commonly used metrics were: Revenue generated by new products. Stage-gate specific metrics, i.e. projects moving from one. stage to the next. Number of ideas generated. The first was the difficulty in creating a set of metrics that are aligned with what senior leadership actually cares about.