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.

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