“Apple is an incredibly collaborative company,” Steve Jobs said. He may have been making an understatement. Recently, I met with the CEO of a medium-sized nonprofit in the immigration services sector. His organization provides assistance to new immigrants...
Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” The person uttering the remark typically is trying to remind you that innovating depends much less on being inspired, and much more – ninety-nine times more – on slugging it out...
Is it really possible to learn to be more creative or more innovative? If the work you’re now doing requires you to be more creative and come up with new ideas that have real value, do you find yourself wondering if you have what it takes? It’s easy to have bought...
In what could be considered an open, city-wide exercise in design thinking, the Toronto Star has teamed up with the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute and urban innovation nonprofit Evergreen CityWorks to try to make 2014 a year where Torontonians...
In 2010, IBM interviewed over 1,500 CEOs and leaders, and they overwhelmingly “selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute.” Why? Because “creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, and … consider...
Would you be surprised to learn that many of history’s most accomplished innovators got their breakthrough idea from something surprisingly ordinary? Something they looked at triggered their new idea, and that something had been right in front of them for a long time....
In January 2010, when Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple iPad to the world, he showed a slide with a smart phone on the left, a laptop on the right, and a big question mark right in the middle. Then he said the question they asked at Apple was “is there room for a...
Happy new year, and welcome to www.thinklikeaninnovator.com, a new blog on innovators and innovating that I decided to start. I decided to start this because I think this may be the biggest challenge of our times – how well and how quickly we are coming up with the...
