My simple, battle-tested strategy for winning at the conference game. Developed to help combat the tendency to comfort-seeking and awkwardness-reduction. Applied in cringe-worthy moments, with delightful results.

After a dozen years teaching at Stanford’s d.school and consulting with the world’s top leaders, the most useful measure of creativity that Perry Klebahn and I have found is deceptively simple.

Your company’s next product might be hiding in plain sight: where you’re already servicing your own needs. Thinking about yourself as the first customer among many, instead of the total addressable market, is a game-changer.

A theme has emerged in my study of breakthrough thinkers: the role that parents play in shaping aspirations. Breakthrough parents plant bold dreams in their kids’ hearts!

We are all busy. The most effective innovators wield their calendar to enhance their practice, rather than be a victim of their schedule. Here’s how to structure your time differently.

One of the prime directives of an innovation leader is to make experiments cheaper to run. Sometimes this has to do with technology; but often, it has to do with the institutional norms driving would-be-innovators’ assumptions and expectations.

Our limited definitions of relevance limit us to far fewer experiments than would be beneficial, within a much narrower range than is likely to reveal a meaningful difference-maker. Fantastic example from Ogilvy.

When all of our time is spoken for, we dramatically reduce the odds of surprises, not to mention shortchanging the longer-duration gestation required for insight formation and creative thinking. How one great leader preserves time for serendipity.

In the last 12 years, I’ve helped some 10,000 new innovators in training come up with new ideas and quickly assess if any are worth pursuing. I have never seen a new product with too few features.

It’s tempting to think that the best place to start is smack dab in the middle of the bell curve. But that’s not the case. The history of innovation teaches that the best breakthroughs (even for the middle of the curve) come from the extremes.

This guest post comes from Richard Wilding, Founder of WMW. Richard observes the default tendency is to lead through cowardice, and imagines a world in which we meet challenges head on, rather than hiding.

Bon Jovi took an unconventional approach to deciding which tracks to include on their third album: they took the cuts in contention to a local pizza joint and played them for high schoolers. We’re all glad they did.

This post comes from Nicholas Thorne, one of the most gifted innovators I know. He writes, “I kindof cringed the first time I asked two people to separately help me with the same creative project. I felt like I was cheating on someone. Creative partnerships, however short-lived, have always seemed monogamous to me. 

One of the most surprising things about discovery is how easily overlooked some breakthroughs are. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, it was nothing more than an absent-minded, off-handed comment during an after-hours diversion.

An incumbent can afford to attract world-class talent. But what about a scrappy start-up? How do they do it? In “In The Plex,” Steven Levy shares how Google managed to attract the brightest in computer science before it had 10 employees. Large orgs should take note, too.

“‘You can't understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids,’ said Marissa Mayer. ‘Montessori’ refers to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them.”

One of the prime directives of an innovation leader is to make experiments cheaper to run. Sometimes this has to do with technology; but often, it has to do with the institutional norms driving would-be-innovators’ assumptions and expectations.

This counter-intuitive gem comes from Kim Scott’s experience writing the breakthrough book “Radical Candor,” having led transformation initiatives at Apple, Google, and Twitter.