What company doesn’t want to be more innovative? But proven practices for making innovation efforts more effective are few and far between. This issue of Schaffer Insights explores the many challenges of innovation and features tools, strategies and case examples that show how to drive it forward.

What a difference one quarter can make! Using a WorkOut project to quickly devise a strategy and put it into action, XL Insurance’s (XLI) newly launched North American Construction Unit hit the ground running, sparking innovation in 13 different areas of business and achieving impressive results in the company’s productivity and profitability. Read an interview with Gary Kaplan, head of the North American Construction Unit, to learn how XLI better defined its value proposition, improved how it targeted contractors for business, and made its development of products and services more efficient.

Q: Tell me how you used a ...

Organizations large and small encourage innovation, but few managers know how to go about change when they are restricted and pigeonholed into their formal job descriptions. This was the case at Siemens in the late 1990s, as described in Matthias Bellmann’s and Robert Schaffer’s article “Freeing Managers to Innovate” (Harvard Business Review). Because the company was so large, many of its thousands of managers did not feel bold enough to venture out of their comfort areas despite encouragement from the company and its cross-unit initiatives. This article shows how Siemens developed an in-house management development program tasked with ...

As organizations grow and become more financially secure, they begin to take fewer risks than typical start-up companies. But this timid approach – grown out of fear that the company will lose its existing business and client base – has the tendency to stunt growth. In Can a Big Company Innovate Like a Start-Up? online at HBR.org, Ron Ashkenas explores the issue of how large, powerhouse organizations can maintain their “start-up edge” while maintaining market-leading positions in their industries.

Avery Dennison, an adhesive films and office products manufacturer, was frustrated with its steady but slow pace of growth, until it turned to Schaffer Consulting’s Rapid Results Approach – a structured process that mobilizes teams to achieve targeted results in 100 days or less, while learning along the way. Learn how the company added $50 million in revenues in the course of one year and achieved an additional $150 million impact in the second year:

The Challenge
In 2001 and 2002, Avery Dennison was growing consistently but slowly. Despite profitable growth as a major corporate goal, the adhesive films and ...

Pilot projects are an excellent pathway for organizations to tap into new markets, gain share, or to introduce new products into existing markets. The problem with most pilot projects however, is the difficulty of then expanding them into the larger organizational marketplaces. So, even though organizations are becoming more innovative with their projects, many fail to stay the course and carry out their projects’ life cycles. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Wes Siegal’s and Evan Smith’s article From Pilot Project to Business Strategy: How to Turn Innovation Into Growth, provides three tips paramount to ...

How can I most effectively unleash innovation? This is a question business leaders from every industry struggle with every day. Recently, two experts tackled it in an online dialogue. They are Evan Smith, a senior partner at Schaffer Consulting who specializes in helping companies energize their innovation processes, and Charlie Garland, a consultant and author whose upcoming book, The Root Cause of Innovation: How Value-Driven Thinking Changes Everything You Do (2011) enlightens business leaders about the innovation process and thinking. Evan and Charlie met more than a decade ago, recruited by mutual friends to work as part of a team ...

Wes Siegal is a senior partner with Schaffer Consulting. He is an organizational psychologist specializing in integrating leadership development into organizational programs that drive improvement and transformation. He has developed and delivered programs that enable effective joint venture collaborations and organizational transformations in pharmaceutical, financial services, manufacturing, and education sectors – most notably at Merck, ING, Avery Dennison, and the Haas School of Business.

As Schaffer Consulting’s leadership development practice leader, Wes works with clients to create programs that develop new leadership and management capabilities while simultaneously achieving breakthrough results in areas as diverse as sales growth, manufacturing efficiency, certification ...