When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer “At night,” or “In the shower,” or “Stuck in traffic.” You get a flash of insight: Aha! William Duggan explains in his new book, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, how the mind forms great leaps and how strategic intuition offers a 4-step method for identifying and capturing new opportunities. I had the opportunity to ask him some questions on the implications of his research for new product ideation, brainstorming, and open innovation.

1) What is the key message or take-away for practitioners in your book?

Successful innovation comes from new combinations of previous elements — the elements themselves are not new — and the method to make that combination contradicts the current practices of most companies who try to stimulate creativity and innovation among their employees.

2) How should for example a new product ideation project be organized if you take strategic intuition into account?

IDEO is famous for A) zany practices like an airplane wing sticking out of the office wall, basketball hoops, rollerskating down the corridor — and none of that matters. They also do B) rapid prototyping and intense customer observation — which is neutral, because you can do that and still get the actual creative part wrong. What they do right is C) bring people who worked on many unrelated projects together to design something new, to consciously bring previous elements together in a new combination. So I would say “do what IDEO does,” but C, not A or B.

3) Eliminate all regular brainstorming sessions?

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As companies increasingly recognize the importance of reaching beyond their four walls, there’s an urgent need for implementation roadmaps in this area. Two world-renowned business innovation experts address this “execution gap” in their new book The Global Brain, and help you identify and implement the best network-centric innovation strategy for your company. An inspiring interview with Satish Nambisan, one of the book’s authors and a global thought leader in the field of innovation:

1) What’s the key message or take-away for practitioners?

The key message is that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to network-centric innovation is a sure prescription to failure (in other words, copying what a P&G or an IBM does in open innovation is not necessarily going to be a successful strategy for your company). There are different forms or models of network-centric innovation. Each company has to identify the approach or model that best fits their particular industry/market context. In this book, we structure the landscape of network-centric innovation (i.e. define the different models of network-centric innovation) and explain how companies can identify the model or approach that is most suitable for them and then prepare for those collaboration opportunities by developing the appropriate portfolio of organizational competencies and capabilities. In sum, companies that invest in processes to systematically identify the right network-centric innovation approach and the requisite organizational capabilities are more likely to benefit from such initiatives than those who blindly follow the latest high-visibility example of network-centric innovation.

2) What are the new, important jobs that will arise from this shift taking place?

Several new entities or roles have emerged in this space – each of which implies a new job or a new type of firm.

For example, my book describes a new type of innovation intermediary called ‘Innovation Capitalist’ – a firm that seeks out innovative ideas from independent inventors, invests in those ideas and transforms them to a stage where their market and technical feasibility are clear, and then sells the related licenses and/or patents to large client firms who can take those ideas to market. We are already seeing several such firms all over the world – in US, in Europe, and in Asian countries such as India and Singapore.

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What happens when you invite more than a million students, faculty members, business people and social media experts into a community to help write a book on community best practices? The answer is a lot. But not in the way that you would think that it would. Not even close.

Community Manager Aaron Strout was willing to share the absorbing, straight-forward story behind the new book We Are Smarter Than Me. The story:

Last October, we launched our wearesmarter.org community. It was an experiment really. The goal was to write a wiki book focused on how companies, big and small, were using community to improve their businesses. Some like Procter & Gamble were tapping into their crowd of 500,000 “connector” moms to help sell a new product, Dawn Direct Foam. Companies like Prosper.com partnered with their customers to create a micro-loan powerhouse. Brewtopia reached out to it’s customers (and prospects) to help them create the recipe and label designs for their beer.

The end result is a great collection of mini-case studies with some great “how to” blurbs that are geared toward helping any individual or company get started with their own customer community. The “journey” however, was the fun part. For one, many of the contributors to the project had ideas of their own. They insisted on joining the founders of the project — Barry Libert (Shared Insights), Jon Spector (Wharton), Tom Malone (MIT) and Tim Moore (Pearson) – on the project’s weekly status calls. The founders of course acquiesced and not surprisingly found that the crowd had a lot of great ideas. Read the rest of this post >