Fostering Innovation in Organizations

Forbes Councils members Alex Goryachev, Ron Cogburn, Masha Sharma, and Maureen Metcalf discuss what innovation means to them, how to stay on top of emerging tech, and what to do if you feel that your company has fallen behind.

Key Takeaways

• Staying on top of new technology, especially in regard to automation, will not only help your company run more smoothly but also lead to better profits.
• Having an innovation team that is diverse in discipline will be beneficial to your company.
• Being well-informed about successes and failures of innovation in other industries is a great way to make sure that your company doesn’t make the same mistakes as others.

Additional Resources

Where Does Innovation Happen Today? Everywhere. by Eugenio Pace

Innovation Is The New Normal — Don’t Get Left Behind by Masha Sharma

Diverse Workforces Are The Holy Grail For Innovation by Richard Wang

Five Reasons Why Innovation Fails by Scott Arpajian

Tweetable Insights

"“Innovations are actually the product of a slow, incremental, march toward improvement based on short term needs in the immediate future.”" — @rccogburn

"“As leaders, we are now making multiple concurrent changes and that’s not going to change in our lifetimes. So the question is, what are the top behaviors we need to be thinking about as we’re changing?”" — @maureenmetcalf

"“If you’re going to be a champion for change, look for success stories in industries or companies facing similar challenges and learn from their mistakes.”" — @genideva

"“Never underestimate the importance of communicating innovation, not only, to your leadership but to your employees."" — @AgoryachAlex

Featured Member

Alex Goryachev is the managing director of Innovation Strategy and programsshort-term at Cisco. He leads Cisco’s Innovation Centers, which bring together customers, partners, startups, developers, accelerators, governments, research communities, and universities in a lab setting. The goal is to discover, co-develop, and implement game-changing, outcome-based solutions.

Ron Cogburn is the Chief Executive Officer of Exela Technologies.  He has more than 30 years of diversified experience in executive management, claims consulting, program management, litigation support, and project management.

Masha Sharma is a co-founder and CTO at RealAtom – a platform for commercial real estate loans. The company was founded in 2016 with the goal of combining the best user experience and product development to bring an offline commercial real estate lending process online and completely reimagine the process end to end.

Maureen Metcalf is the founder, CEO, and Board Chair of the Innovative Leadership Institute, a highly sought-after expert in anticipating and leveraging future business trends to transform organizations. She has captured her thirty years of experience and success in an award-winning series of books that are used by public, private, and academic organizations to align company-wide strategy, systems, and culture with innovative leadership techniques.

This podcast originally appeared in Forbes Councils on July 30, 2019

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