As the first quarter of the new decade comes to a close, I have seen a couple articles about innovation lately, particularly about Google and how its “angle’s” spread their wings. In the March 8 edition of Business Week, Spencer Ante and Kimberly Weisul wrote about how Google’s past employees have networked and invested in 200 fledging companies since 2005. They like to swap investment ideas and back startups together. They have taken an opportunity, put it through the innovation machine and come out on top with a new and improved model, shaping the wave of innovation.
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Tags: creative, guidelines, Innovation
Category: Articles
About Becky Livingston: Becky Livingston is the President and Founder of Royal Apple Marketing. Her company specializes in social and digital marketing for small businesses, non-profits, and CPA firms with a particular interest in building/expanding an online brand, increasing web site traffic, and developing a strategic marketing plan that leverages digital marketing.
With 20 years’ in-house marketing and communication experience in the engineering, technology, and financial services industries, Becky has been a leader in helping teams to reach their goals through effective and strategic communication and marketing execution.
Speaker, author, and trainer, Becky enjoys helping teams to meet their full marketing potential through social and digital marketing efforts. She also volunteers her time with her dog, Abby, in the Therapy Dogs International “Children Reading to Dogs” program.
Becky holds a Corporate Training Certificate from New York University, a Master’s degree in Information Systems from PACE University, and an undergraduate degree in Marketing Communications from the State University of New York—Geneseo.
Connect with Becky on Twitter (@bmliving or @RoyalAppleMktg) and LinkedIn, or read one of her blogs at http://bit.ly/CorporateCreatives,
Royal Apple Marketing (http://www.royalapplemarketing.com/), InSource.org, or CPA Trendlines (http://cpatrendlines.com/).
This and other articles on In-Source.org by Becky Livingston, © Becky Livingston 2009-2012 View author profile.
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I try to empower my creative teams to think outside of the template or previous work. That’s difficult sometimes in a corporate environment with strict branding guidelines, but it can be done. By giving my teams freedom, I have seen some very creative work.
I require 3 suggestions a month from each of my staff. Their ideas could be about a process improvement, new software they’d discovered, new skills that we could learn, new technology they’d like to learn more about, new types of projects we could offer to do for the company, or thoughts on a field trip we could take. Then we’d meet and talk about all the ideas and see what ones we wanted to move forward. This served to keep everyone thinking and feeling that they are active participants helping to craft the future of the group. It broke down our silos and made us one of the most enviable teams in the company.
A great book I recently read for one of my MBA classes in Design and Innovation Management is a book titled “Design,” which is part of the “Tom Peters Essentials” book series.
It’s a very inspiring book about taking design thinking to the next level. It’s a small book and a quick read!