Ken Cooper | Teaching Innovation.

You probably think that the barriers to innovation are negative elements of your organization — that is, the wrong people, behaviors, and processes. But the most subtle and pernicious barriers to innovation may be the seemingly positive myths about what has made your organization successful.

Every organization has myths about who are the great leaders, what are the behaviors to admire and imitate, what business you are in, what customers want, what are the best skills to run a...

Sometimes when I am reviewing the work of our innovation groups I see how hard they tried to be innovative, and, as a result, completely missed the point. If innovation is the creation and delivery of new value, they have focused too hard on the "new" part and not enough on the "value" part.

The best way to innovate is not to try to be innovative — forget the goatee and the trendy eyewear — but to be a humble servant: listening hard, thinking hard, anticipating and...

Product developers can learn much from manufacturing, but many have gone too far in applying ideas that work in manufacturing to their realm. That's because they have ignored some fundamental differences between the two disciplines. Let's look at three and their implications.

Manufacturing produces physical objects; product developers produce information.
This may seem like a trivial...

In his classic, Talks to Teachers, William James observed that "All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits." Essentially, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep, most of our daily activities are repetitive, unconscious habits. We brush our teeth, eat breakfast, go to gym and do things which, on closer examination, happen without much will and reason. They're just habits. A daily mass of these...

Some exciting news to share with the HBR community: The new HBR iPad app is now live in the iTunes app store. This launch is the realization of almost a year's worth of planning, proposing, modeling, designing, building, and general preparation. Senior Editor Scott Berinato and Assistant Product Marketing Director Kate Adams led dozens of people in the effort — in the building here and also...