The following articles are the Top 3 Innovation Insights this week with a brief snapshot summary of their strategic importance to your firm.

Six Lessons on Innovation from the Wright Brothers (Forbes)

Snapshot: Imagination creates the future. Without the Wright Brothers incessant experimentation and belief in themselves, the world would have been a different place without the airline industry. The Wrights’ tenacity showed that it wasn’t luck that enabled them to succeed; it was hard work, common sense and flexibility. Some of the lessons learned include:

• “Don’t worry about failure,”
• “Don’t expect instant success,” and
• “Keep going no matter what.”

You can read the full article here (with all six lessons) on Forbes.

Strategic Impact: Too often companies invest in innovation teams and expect instant results. Testing ideas, testing designs, test marketing and other means of checkpoints along the way are vital to any mission critical success. Theories must be proved in order to help leaders, investors and customers understand the value in new inventions, processes and services. It’s not just about creativity, it’s about practicality too.

[Source: Sephora]

Snapshot: At least three retailers work on applying Silicon Valley startup strategies in order to create a sustained competitive advantage: Sephora, Kohl’s and Sears. The one company that has the most to benefit from is Sears – founded in 1886. It is one of the few 100+ year-old companies in the US. Yet all three are seeking to:

• create new apps,
• engage customer experiences,
• improve online shopping and
• collaborate with startups to diversify their products and services to enhance their financial growth.

For more on this article, click here to read via Retail Dive.

Strategic Impact: Any company seeking to integrate digital technology within brick and mortar locations would benefit from establishing an Innovation Lab – a place to experiment while testing the waters for real world interactions. Collaborating with startups also minimizes the risk, cost and time it would take if each retailer were to create new IP in-house. Collaborating with other startups is the stepping stone for accelerating innovation.

Six Strategies for Putting Innovation to Work in Your Organizations (B2C)

Snapshot: Sparking corporate innovation not only takes the right mindset, but also takes the right strategies. Dr. Alvind Mahotra, the lead professor of Strategy & Innovation at UNC’s online MBA program articulates six strategies to put innovation to work within teams. The first three are:

1) Nurture collaboration;

2) Question and discard, if needed and

3) Embrace “What if?”

To read all six strategies, click here for the B2C Community article.

Strategic Impact: The underlying value of corporate innovation is to increase stakeholder value (profitability) and sustain a long-term competitive advantage. Applying these six strategies (and others) would provide a catalyst for generating new innovations from a bottoms-up and top-down approach. Companies can continue to learn more about how to innovate in new and different ways by applying new strategies being developed by MBA entrepreneurship programs across the country.

Are there other articles you’ve read recently that you would consider highlighting? Let us know via innovation@18.219.185.187.

If you’re interested in how to provide innovation training and/or foster an entrepreneurial mindset in your company, contact us.

[Ed Valdez is Vice President of Global Business Strategy at G51.]