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  Businesses get strategies for innovation. Open mindset, process for new ideas, collaboration are necessary. A corporate guru yesterday set out in a speech the five broad strategies that should guide businesses seeking innovation. The strategies include an open mindset towards opportunities, a process for managing new ideas and collaboration with customers and stakeholders, said Robert Tucker. The others were developing an innovative culture and a measurement and reward systems for innovation.
India’s Business Standard: If you don’t innovate, someone else will. India is the 11th country on his agenda this year - and the diary’s still open. But Robert Tucker doesn’t find the constant travel exhausting. Instead, the corporate innovation guru uses the opportunity to study how innovation is being practised in different markets and then offers the examples as case studies.
 Incrementalism is the enemy of true innovation. People have to think big. Innovation guru, Robert Tucker, who was in town to speak at the “Art of Innovation” seminar organized by CNBC-TV18 in Mumbai recently spoke to Mint [India’s Wall Street Journal] on why innovation is becoming increasingly important in a competitive global marketplace. Tucker has worked with a wide range of companies which include IBM India, Satyam Computer Systems Ltd, Nokia Oyj, American Express among others.
DNA India: An innovation calendar is a must for every company. As a president of The Innovation Resource, a research and innovation consulting firm based in Santa Barbara, California, US, Robert B Tucker has worked with companies including IBM India, Satyam, Nokia, American Express and Citibank to deliver growth and innovation. His numerous books include the international bestseller Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change for the New Century. Tucker spoke on growth through innovation at an event organised by CNBC TV18 in Mumbai on Tuesday. Excerpts: Can innovation ever be systematic? A Yes, we can never systemize the grand innovative idea. But, an innovation calendar is must for the company, where people meet and ideate about disruptive models.
InnovationTools: Robert B. Tucker predicts innovation trends. Robert Tucker is the author of several books on innovation, including the classic Driving Growth Through Innovation. In February, he will release Inside the Innovation Elite: Practices of the World’s Most Innovative Companies as an “online, on-demand briefing” to update executives with what’s going on in the field. As president of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group in Santa Barbara, California, USA, Tucker works with a wide range of companies including IBM, Nokia, American Express and Citibank each year to deliver growth through innovation. He recently sat down with InnovationTools’ Chuck Frey, to discuss the global innovation movement, key trends for 2007, and the latest methods companies are developing to drive results.
The Power of Creative Imagination, the cover story in SolutionsWorld magazine features quotes from Paul Saffo, Michael Schrage, Robert Tucker and Yahoo’s Oliver Raskin in it’s Sept/Oct 2006 issue.
 Fortune Magazine Innovation Forum hears from Robert Tucker on “The Importance of Rewarding Risk-Taking Behavior.” In this forum, Tucker urges that you steer clear of monetary rewards in favor of recognition for innovators, and publicize examples of initiatives that are successful.
| Trust Your Gut: How The Power of Intuition Can Grow Your Business, by Lynn Robinson (Kaplan Publishing, 2006) features a chapter devoted to the ideas of Robert Tucker (“Liberate Your Inner Innovator”), and his suggestions for tapping its guiding power. “Innovation, by its very nature, means that you’re doing something that’s never been done before,” says Tucker. “There are no step-by-step recipes and no market research that can guarantee success. But going with your gut can become a kind of sixth sense that can tell you to ‘keep the faith and continue’ or ‘throw in the towel’." |
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PA Manufacturers Magazine: Open Your Mind to Innovation. After a recent series of workshops and talk shows for Pennsylvania manufacturers, Robert Tucker was interviewed by Pennsylvania Manufacturer magazine for his insights into developing a systematic approach to innovation in small and mid-sized manufacturing companies. In this article, Tucker and other innovation experts urged CEOs to assess how many potential breakthrough, substantial, and incremental innovations were in their pipelines, and to take other steps to build capability.
TEQ helps tech companies dispel innovation myths. BodyMedia, Inc. and other Pittsburgh area tech companies are finding that one of the greatest misunderstandings about innovation is that tech companies are, by their very nature, innovative and need not consider the matter again. According to Robert Tucker, “Each company needs to create a blueprint for its innovation process.” Tucker gives three questions to guide that blueprint and addresses the challenge of managing creative thinkers.
Rewarding risk-takers will spark innovation. After years of rewarding behavior that cut costs and lowered risk, CEOs need to reinforce the behavior that will lead to organic growth. Tucker notes that behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. If you’re now looking for different behavior, you have to get clear on exactly what actions, decisions, cultural norms and values you’ve been rewarding — and then look for ways to incent different behaviors going forward.
Creativity is essential for success in all companies. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), a system driven by innovation, endorses Tucker’s assertion that creativity and innovation are vital to long term success and must be cultivated. “By recognizing and honoring the important role of creativity, and by encouraging people to further develop it, it’s possible to spur innovation at all levels of an organization,” says Robert B. Tucker.
 Washington Post features TIR Senior Consultant Bart Tucker’s philanthropy in the Gulf Coast. Tucker and his church group have spent 8 weeks in East Biloxi, Mississippi, helping residents rebuild after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. As one of many faith groups working in the hurricane ravaged areas, Tucker’s group has been cleaning and restoring homes in the city, bringing life back to a once devastated area.
Ask the Expert: Tucker says innovation requires a systematic approach. While cost-cutting measure like Six Sigma can create short term results, they don’t build a future source of wealth. According to Tucker, innovative companies “are designing and implementing a process for innovation that keeps future growth on the front burner, no matter how busy everyone is executing on today’s deliverables. They are learning from the mistakes of failed initiatives, and adopting the best practices of ‘innovation vanguard companies’ in order to foster cultures where employees contribute ideas that get taken seriously.”
Manufacturers need an Innovation Action Plan. Esselte Corporation in Stamford, CT recently implemented a complete innovation makeover. Their innovation plan follows Robert Tucker’s strategy for improving enterprise-wide innovation, which he defines on three levels: product, process, and strategy. "Companies have to do all three," Tucker says. "Companies are now starting to recognize that they can't wait for the next happy accident to get to the next breakthrough idea. It's not enough to meet the challenges manufacturers face today."
Sometimes, being innovative involves little things. At SC Johnson and Sons, the Wisconsin-based consumer products company, executives were spending most of their days in back-to-back meetings and never had a chance to decompress or just think about ways to improve products or processes. So a mandate went out, every other Friday, there would be no meetings and execs were encouraged to use that time to think about how to make things better. Tucker discusses removing barriers to innovation.
Tucker conducts seminar for 500 executives in Bogota, Colombia. During his second appearance in Bogota in the past 8 months, Tucker discovered Colombian companies embracing product and branding innovation as a source of growth and differentiation. Dinero, the Fortune Magazine of Colombia interviewed Tucker prior to his trip. |
“Companies that master innovation and make it a core competency will inherit the future”, Tucker tells a packed house at this all-day event sponsored by Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración. |
During his afternoon session, Tucker discussed how multinational companies such as Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool, GE and Citibank are developing new ways to imbed innovation into their way of doing business. |
Celebrating after the seminar.
Right to Left: Santiago Zapata of HiCue Speakers Bureau , Marc Gobé, co-presenter and author of Emotional Branding, Alina Rodriguez, Marketing Director Publicaciones Semana, and Robert B. Tucker. |
Chatting with officials from Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia. Our special thanks to Richard Barcham, account executive of International Speakers Bureau in Dallas for brokering this event. |
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Global Innovation Movement reaches a tipping point, according to this article from the InnovationTools web site. It was the year innovation went mainstream as a specific, manageable process and discipline of organizations wanting to survive longer than the “tipping point” expression is bound to. What happened in 2004? It was as if CEOs were jolted to “do something about innovation” en masse. I suspect they'd heard the expression, “we've got a process for everything else, why not innovation” one too many times and decided to finally make a move. Suffice to say that last year record numbers of companies took first steps to improve the innovation process within their firms.
Innovation Must Be More Than a Buzzword, to Survive the China Price. Management consultant Robert Tucker is concerned that, other than the technologically advanced "big guys" of American manufacturing, many firms are "asleep" in the face of the China threat and won't budge from their comfort zone of doing things the way they've always done them. Innovating their processes, products or strategies is the last thing on their agenda as they put out their latest fire, said Tucker, of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group, Santa Barbara, Calif.
Grind Takes Its Toll as Workload Gets Spread Among Fewer Bodies, reports the Los Angeles Business Journal. What happens when a roomful of knowledge workers finally hits a wall of fatigue? Productivity falls and burnout increases. Robert B. Tucker, president of Innovation Resource of Santa Barbara, said workers spend too much of their time responding to e-mails, phone calls and voice-mail messages and not enough time coming up with innovative ideas. That's more the fault of the employers, who have not made new hires even though corporate profits have skyrocketed.
Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Innovative thinking is the key to surviving in a shifting market. During a recent lecture at Case Western Reserve University, Tucker likened innovation to a muscle that has been allowed to atrophy as manufacturers focused on cutting costs and making plant processes more efficient. Marketing and talking to new customer groups are "foreign to most of our manufacturing leaders," he said. "The only time they do it is when they're in a pinch." Tucker urged companies to take inventory of their competencies and ask who else might benefit from them.
Too much to do makes workers dull. The average worker is interrupted daily by an average of 200 e-mails, according to a Gallup Pitney Bowes survey, and that doesn't account for assorted phone calls and voice mail messages. Result: less time to be creative, Tucker told a standing room only audience of area manufacturers in Allentown, Pennsylvania recently. ''With our multi-tasking work style, everyone has so much to get done,'' Tucker said. ''It's not good for creating ideas.''
Wall Street Journal's "Career Journal" interviews Tucker
Even job searches go better when we inject the spirit of innovative thinking. This article discusses three ways Tucker suggests job-seekers search differently, including identifying what you're passionate about, brainstorming with different people and being open to suggestions.
Robert
Tucker accepts Senior Fellowship at the Design Futures
Council, Washington, D.C. At a banquet ceremony in La Jolla,
California, on May 6th, 2003, Tucker was designated a Senior
Fellow at the Design Futures Council, joining such luminaries
as Joe Pine, John Seeley Brown, former Harvard professor Richard
Farson and the late inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. Tucker
presented his ideas on "The Architecture of Innovation"
the following day at DFC’s Summit on Creativity at the
Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA.
DFC is a global network of design community professionals
whose mission is to explore trends, changes, and new opportunities
in design, architecture, engineering, and building technology.
Members include leading architecture and design firms; manufacturers
and service providers and forward-thinking construction and
design firms from throughout the world.
Innovation champion Robert B. Tucker
during a recent speaking engagement
Influential reviewer gives Driving Growth Through Innovation five star
rating. Innovation Tools, Inc.'s publisher Chuck Frey, a leading voice of
the Innovation Movement, rates Tucker's new book "one of the best innovation
books I've read in a long time," and gives it his coveted highest
endorsement.
"Tucker does a terrific job of clearly and compellingly
explaining the systematic innovation methodologies used by
the extraordinarily successful Innovation Vanguard companies,
and provides readers with one valuable insight after another
into how to make these principles work for you. Driving Growth
Through Innovation is highly practical and inspiring book,
a field guide to successfully implementing systematic innovation
that should be on every entrepreneur and innovation manager's
bookshelf, yet at the same time a compelling manifesto for
change in how most companies approach innovation. I highly
recommend this book!"
For a link to the full review (and to register to receive
Chuck Frey's influential weekly updates on innovation and
brainstorming software)
Innovation
Focus interviews Robert B. Tucker
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