Best Innovation quotation

“We often think of grand innovations, like the invention of the light bulb, as what drives economic growth. But equally important, and perhaps more important, are the 1,001 small innovations that regular business managers and line workers do every day at their jobs.”

- Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan economist and Digital-Business Expert, as quoted in the MIT Sloan Management Review

Innovation Quote of the week

“The ROI on innovation is survival.”

- Andrew Howlett, CEO of Rain, a marketing company

Think Winning Through Innovation & Creativity

Leadership Return on Investment

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

– Henry David Thoreau

Famous Leadership Quote

“Genius is the fruit of a thousand failures.”

- Greg Linden, as quoted in the MIT Sloan Management Review

Innovation in Business

Leadership, Business and Innovation

“While corporate leaders may intellectually accept the need for innovation and promote their commitment to innovation at every opportunity, many really don't get it…Chief executives are doing surprisingly little to build innovation cultures in their companies. If they were, surely more than 10% of these leaders would say they were following ‘best practices’ in their industry in pursuit of innovation. Perhaps this is why only about 25% of the members of my network groups say their CEO has the right mindset and understanding of innovation to support the company's innovation success.” – Source: Copenhagen-based author Stefan Lindegaard, as quoted in Business Week magazine, March 3, 2010

Are your competitors innovating for you?

“Despite the very real prospect of prolonged economic malaise, the financial services industry is at an amazing moment,” claims guest columnist Ryan Jacoby in a March 22 Business Week article. In spite of this being an “amazing moment,” Jacoby shares his view that “most big banks are terrible at innovating” and are letting this moment slip away.

“Consumers want new products and services to help them become more confident, educated caretakers of their own money. There's real opportunity here,” writes Jacoby. “Only, most big banks are letting startups figure out how to serve their customers better.”


Jacoby shares that big banks can reverse this trend by bringing greater creativity and innovation to such areas as customer experience, data use, and new product and service design.

Aging Workforce?

A study by The Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, referenced in a recent issue of T+D magazine, finds that, “The top four (business) priorities ranked as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ among state agencies are: increasing productivity through increased efficiency (97.3%), management of workforce talent (95.3%), organizational ethics (93.5%), and cost leadership (89.8%).”

In addition, the study found that government offices actually “excel” in, “their awareness and assessment of the impact of the aging workforce on their organizations.” However, in comparison to the private sector, government offices, “have found it more difficult than the private sector to implement change.” The study determined that some state agencies’ negative perceptions of late-career employees include, “reluctance to travel and new technologies,” “burned out” and “difficult to train.”

Innovation Quotation

“Innovation is invention times impact. Invention is nice, but if it has no economic or social impact it is useless.”

– Source: Marco Iansiti, author and Harvard Business School professor