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Global team leaders who unleash ideas, we find, are those who: 1) ask questions, and listen carefully; 2) facilitate constructive argument; 3) give actionable feedback; 4) take advice from the team and act on it; 5) share credit for team success; and 6) maintain regular contact with team members. Members of global teams whose leaders exhibit at least three of these behaviors are more likely than global team members whose leaders exhibit none of these behaviors to say they feel free to express their views and opinions (89% vs 19%) and that their ideas are heard and recognized (76% vs 20%).

Research we conducted at the Center for Talent Innovation reveals a remarkable correlation between inclusive leadership, innovative output, and market growth.

Everyone wants to be that person — the one who looks at the same information as everyone else, but who sees a fresh, innovative solution. However, it takes more than simply having a good idea. How you share it is as important as the suggestion itself.

Consumers are incredibly poor predictors of the next big thing. Their knee-jerk reaction to new technology is almost always to say they don’t need it and will never use it. For many company leaders, this creates a significant business challenge: They know they must drive change to stay competitive, yet they have no way to determine with confidence which moves will be successful.

Leaders are now recognizing the need for innovation to solve the most challenging and costly organizational problems. Here are 10 steps your can take to foster everyday innovation.

"The need for continuous and sustained innovation has never been greater for organizations, regardless of size, industry, market, or profit vs. non-profit status. As markets continue to grow more global, open, and competitive and customer expectations become more diverse and demanding, innovation is everyone's business."

Jason Jennings, author of The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change, introduces a lesson in leveraging existing capabilities from How to Kill a Unicorn: How the World’s Hottest Innovation Factory Builds Bold Ideas That Make It to Market, by Mark Payne.

Overcoming adversity through innovating is a process that begins with mental toughness, cultivating one’s curiosity, and doing what others aren’t doing.

Mental Toughness

The first step in becoming innovative is accepting that the world around us needs to change, sometimes because of unexpected and unprecedented events, and believing that we as individuals must take initiative to make that change happen. It requires ongoing learning and an open mind with a willingness to see the world in new ways. Upon such realization, one must develop an unshakable mental toughness for the long haul. As Kamkwamba said during his 2009 TED talk, “How I Harnessed The Wind:”

Leaders are accountable to assemble teams and lead them to optimal performance outcomes. An effective leader recognizes the importance of embracing differences in people and knows how to connect the dots amongst those differences to get the best outcomes from the team. This is what cultivates a workplace environment of continuous improvements, innovation and initiative. Leaders must foster a commitment from the team to embrace an innovation mindset where each employee learns to apply the differences that exist in one another for their own success and that of the organization. Here are 5 immediate things leaders can do with their teams to foster an environment of innovation and initiative. They apply whether you are forming a new team or revamping an existing one.

Some of the greatest fortunes and empires in history were created by people who started with nothing. Today, the author celebrates 25 of these iconic figures – businessmen, technology entrepreneurs, even celebrities and athletes – by recalling the tales of their rise to glory.

Don’t feel bad if your favorites aren’t on the list, this is just a glimpse of the many visionaries we’ve seen throughout history and there are countless others who also deserve attention. While each of them took a slightly different path to financial greatness, virtually all of them started from very humble beginnings.

Innovation isn’t a natural mindset for most leaders—or for the companies they work for—but the good news is that innovation can be learned.

On the surface, many companies that have been deemed part of the sharing economy seem to have much in common: They attempt to disrupt incumbents by going direct to consumers with an offering that is more convenient, more flexible, and often less expensive than what their traditional rivals offer. They have created a new wave of micro-entrepreneurs able to create value by unlocking underutilized resources, such as extra space for lodging and idle automobiles. Others let customers hire someone to do small jobs, rent a bicycle from a neighbor, or borrow money. They have filled unmet market needs.

By Lindsey Own - A job description that could serve as a template for building innovation leadership in any school.

Recently I explored the notion of the “Innovator’s Mindset”, and have thought a lot about this idea.  As I look to write on the topic of “Leading Innovative Change” within schools, we are looking to develop educators as innovators.  To be innovative, you have to look at yourself as an innovator first, and to create schools that embody this mindset as a “culture”, we must develop this in individuals first.

Learn more:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Growth+Mindset

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=innovation

-  https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/practice-learning-to-learn/

-  https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/practice-learning-to-learn-example-2/

-  https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/design-the-learning-of-your-learners-students-ideas/

-  https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/education-collaboration-and-coaching-the-future/

-  https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/cyber-hygiene-ict-hygiene-for-population-education-and-business/

The Social Age is a time of constant change: an evolved landscape of work and play. The nature of work itself has changed and, alongside it, the social contract between organisation and individual. Our relationship with knowledge has evolved too: away from knowing stuff to creating meaning. The ability to find meaning in the moment and to do it again, tomorrow, differently. Which is what we call agility and uninhibited curiosity. The desire and freedom to question everything.

vía @juandoming

What would you do if you had a working prototype of a revolutionary tablet computer that was receiving rave reviews well before Apple came out with its iPad? Cancel further funding for the project in favor of developing an updated version of an existing company product? In hindsight that seems crazy, but it’s exactly what Microsoft did with its prototype “Courier” tablet.

Similar fates often befall innovations within large companies. It is not enough to come up with next great idea. To turn that idea into a reality you have to influence people and gain their support. You must do that in the face of vast forces arrayed against innovation within an established organization, which include inertia, resistance to change, fear of failure, financial disincentives, and the tendency of people and organizations to favor what has worked in the past. Then there’s what might be the biggest hurdle of all, people’s inability to envision something that is truly different.

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

Human history is littered with examples of how rebuilding is so much swifter and more complete if whatever preceded it was wiped out.  Of course, that has typically come after something very bad has happened.

Many people embark on their entrepreneurial career after something as major yet of course on a far smaller scale.

It is just so much easier for most of us to build or learn something altogether new than it is to rebuild by replacing the bricks of our castle one at a time or to have to relearn something we feel we already know most of.

Serial rebuilders and serial learners are probably spared from this, but for most of us, having our ways that we do things can be counter-productive when changes are required, as so many changes are incompatible with the processes we have set up or the ideas that have become ingrained in us.

The importance of not being hung up on old methodologies when learning new or updated technologies really can’t be stressed enough.  The least satisfying of all reasons I hear for people doing things in inefficient ways are the variations on a theme of “this is the way we do things”.  But those old methods may simply not work anymore!

Comparing many large companies to some of the more vibrant and innovative newcomers of the last several years, it can come of little surprise, particularly to people who have at any time worked in Corporate America or their country’s equivalent, that the bulk of innovation comes from the stealthy newcomers that are not bound by restrictions of their own making.

Innovation comes from informal key leadership roles. Brokers, Role Models and Risk-takers are the engine of innovation cultures.