Corporate intrapreneurs face the ultimate challenge in business: navigating uncertainty. That's why it's so important to learn new problem-solving techniques. The challenge? Your time and resources are limited. As much as you'd love to attend every corporate innovation conference that you come across, you simply can't.
To help you cut to the chase to the most valuable talks, RocketSpace will bring you a curated roundup of fresh conference talks from events like TED. This month's theme? Techniques for encouraging creativity.
While many CEOs intentionally avoid conflict, Margaret Heffernan, former CEO of five international businesses, views disagreement as integral to progress. Through studies of European and American executives, Heffernan shows how the best leaders, colleagues, and employees avoid echo chambers, and why the best businesses encourage people to disagree.
Tim Brown, CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO, explains why exploration, thinking with your hands, and role-play are the building blocks of innovation. In other words, childlike play is critical if you want to be a seriously successful professional adult.
Got a Wicked Problem? First, Tell Me How You Make Toast
Tom Wujec, designer and advocate of business visualization, shares why he loves asking teams of all kinds to draw the process of making toast. Despite the task's outward simplicity, Wujec insists it illustrates how we can solve our most complex problems at work.
How to Manage for Collective Creativity
Harvard professor Linda Hill, co-author of Collective Genius, urges organizations to unlearn their conventional notions of leadership. After thorough ethnographic investigations of Pixar and Google, Hill's takeaway is this: "Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius."
Smart Failure for a Fast-Changing World
Businesses need to take change seriously, argues Edward David Asihene "Eddie" Obeng, founder and Learning Director of Pentacle. According to Obeng, we live in a world where doing more of the same is no longer acceptable. So what should innovators do to achieve success? Fail.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love makes a compelling case for the power of simply showing up in the creative process. Good old-fashioned hard work might not sound as sexy as a sudden Eureka moment, but Gilbert argues it's the best way to tap into your creative genius.
How did Airbnb, an online marketplace to list and rent vacation homes, overcome our deeply rooted stranger-danger bias? With over 2 million listings and a valuation of more than $25 billion, Joe Gebbia, co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, finally shares the hospitality powerhouse's secret sauce: impeccable design.
Available in 292 languages and counting, Wikipedia has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. Jimmy Wales, founder of "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," explains how he brought together "a ragtag band of volunteers" and gave them tools to create the self-organizing, self-correcting, and multilingual encyclopedia of the future.
According to Charles Leadbeater, financial journalist turned innovation consultant, innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Using the invention of the mountain bike as an example, which was created by frustrated users, not money-hungry companies, Leadbetter insists that consumers are now becoming some of the world's sharpest innovators.
From Mach-20 Glider to Hummingbird Drone
Regina Dugan, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, asks audience members, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Dugan highlights some of the incredible innovations — thought-controlled prosthetics, robotic hummingbirds, and even the internet — that her agency was only able to create by refusing to fear failure.
Final Thoughts
If you feel like you have hit a plateau trying to inspire creativity with your corporate innovation efforts, don't get frustrated. Take a breather and figure out how you can outsmart your challenges instead. Share these TED talks with your team and sign up for our email list for additional inspiration.
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