Innovation is so popular, you might get the impression it’s the right management instrument for every organization. As innovator, I know it´s not.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at historical expeditions and why many of them failed. Expeditions that never succeeded due to the cold, heavy storms or starvation. Expeditions like that of John Franklin, whose entire fleet perished while looking for the legendary Northwest Passage in 1845. Or those who were not well prepared or inexperienced like Andrée who set out for the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon in 1897. Or expeditions that suffered from design faults and equipment malfunctions like the Soyuz 1 in 1967 or Apollo 13 in 1970. Or expeditions that lacked the right leadership and team spirit like the expedition leader Charles Francis Hall who was poisoned by his crew in 1871 on a Polar expedition.

Drawing from the learning experiences of both successful as well as failed expeditions, I have compiled a list of situations when you should not innovate. I am aware that this can be provoking. It’s meant to be. This is where innovation starts: opening people’s mind, challenging current opinions, habits and practices.

21 Situations when you should not innovate:

1. When you are sure your market is not changing in the coming five years.
2. When your clients are even more conservative than you are.
3. When your old formulas are still giving great risk-free results for the coming years.
4. When brand and line extensions bring you a lot of extra turnover and profits.
5. When the urgency to innovate is completely absent.
6. When you don’t receive enough money and manpower to do it.
7. When your company is in a short-term crisis.
8. When your organization is working at full capacity to meet the current huge demand.
9. When everybody says: “Innovate!”, but no one wants to be responsible.
10. When you´re clueless about what you´re looking for.
11. When there is no real business need and it’s only nice to have.
12. When you can’t form a capable harmonious team that really goes for it.
13. When there is no support at the top.
14. When the people in your organization are not (yet) prepared to break their habits.
15. When people in your company are lazy; content to copy from others.
16. When the organization doesn’t have any kind of vision about its future course.
17. When long term planning means looking three months ahead.
18. When everyone fears failure.
19. When everyone will attack and ridicule the newness of an idea.
20. When important stakeholders will block it at any time.
21. When your latest innovations are so successful and still need further exploitation.

So, keeping these situations in mind, remember to wait for the right moment, as you’ll only have one chance to start innovation for the first time.

Nothing works better changing a mindset than a great quote. Here you find 25 of my personal favorites on innovation. Use them to think different in 2013:

1. Nothing is stronger than habit. [Ovid]

2. If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. [Albert Einstein]

3. It’s tough when markets change and your people within the company don’t. [Harvard Business Review]

4. They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. [Andy Warhol]

5. We cannot solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. [A. Einstein]

6. Necessity is the mother of invention. [Anonymous]

7. Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open. [T. Dewar]

8. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. [George Bernard Shaw]

9. There are no old roads to new directions. [The Boston Consulting Group]

10. You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. [Andre Gide]

11. Innovation is anything, but business as usual. [Anonymous]

12. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. [Alan Kay]

13. If at first the idea is not absurd, then there will be no hope for it. [A. Einstein]

14. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. [Arthur Koestler]

15. A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind. [A. von Szent-Gyorgyi]

16. Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices. [L. Duncan]

17. Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. [Demosthenes]

18. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. [Robert Frost]

19. The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. [A. Clarke]

20. The key to success is for you to make a habit throughout your life of doing the things you fear. [Vincent Van Gogh]

21. The impossible is often the untried. [J. Goodwin]

22. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. [Oscar Wilde]

23. Ideas are useless unless used. [T. Levitt]

24. It is not how many ideas you have. It’s how many you make happen. [Advertisement of Accenture]

25. The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own. [N. Bushnell]

Every small business owner wants to succeed. Why put your blood, sweat, and tears into launching a new venture, only to watch it fail? And yet, many of them do. Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of small business owners and I have learned that in order to create a successful small business, your venture has to abide by certain principles.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a principle is “A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.”

The principles of a business are the driving forces that make it successful. They are the backbone for the organization. In my mind, there are ten such principles that underlie the creation of the most successful small business in the world.

1. Scalability

A business must be scalable for it to be successful. A small business built rightly can grow 10,000 times its current size.

2. Big Ideas

A small business is no more effective than the idea upon which it is built. The entrepreneur’s vision is more important to the life of the business than anything else.

3. Systems

You must recognize that a small business is a System in which all parts contribute to the success or failure of the whole. In this system, everything must work together: from employee to president; from equipment to resources.

4. Sustainability

A business must be dynamic—able to thrive through all economic conditions, in all markets, providing meaningful, highly differentiated results to all of its customers. Such differentiation is key to survival.

5. Growth

All businesses need internal growth. A small business is a School in which its employees are students, with the intention, will, and determination to grow.

6. Vision

A small business must manifest the Higher Purpose upon which it was seeded, the vision it was meant to exemplify, the mission it was intended to fulfill.

7. Purpose

A small business is the fruit of a Higher Aim in the mind of the person who conceived it.

8. Autonomy

A business is not part of the owner’s life, but is, in fact, its own entity. A small business possesses a life of its own, in the service of God, in whom it finds reason.

9. Profitability

A small business is an economic entity, driving an economic reality, creating an economic certainty for the communities in which it thrives.

10. Standards

A small business creates a Standard against which all small businesses are measured as either successful, or not.  All small businesses should aim to thrive beyond the standards that formerly existed.

So, there you have it, the ten principles upon which to conceive, grow, and expand your business. Each business needs a shape and structure, and these principles will give your company an outline, which is necessary for it to thrive.

Read More

By Jake Rocheleau

The Internet technology scene is bursting with new innovations every month. If you’ve spent any time researching social media then you may be familiar with the term “startup”. This generally describes a new business launch in a particular market i.e. tech startup would be a startup based on a tech product or service. Facebook could once have been deemed a startup, along with Twitter. More current examples are Foursquare and Pinterest.

Read More