PART 2: When doing Core innovation (sometimes referred to as Evolutionary, Horizon 1 or 2 or Incremental Innovation), teams can make progress with innovation within their current work systems.  After an initial Core Innovation makes it through early filters, the work is quickly compartmentalized so each silo can flip into execution mode.   READ MORE

As the CEO of a firm that works with companies of all sizes on innovation, I have the unique opportunity to get the perspective of both large and small organizations. My team and I certainly hear a fair amount of “the grass is greener” sentiment on both sides. READ MORE

The classic method of segregating innovation to a single department, or to a process led by specialists, just isn’t fast enough any longer. What’s needed is a culture in which innovation is the mission of everyone, everywhere, every day. READ MORE

Learn from the CEOs, marketers and other folks contributing to the success of many of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. They were among the speakers at the ThInc Out Loud conference, sponsored by Inc Events, in mid-October in San Diego. READ MORE

How would you like to look into your business future before you leap into it?

What if I told you that you could input your new product idea, marketing plan, sales presentation or new service into a computer to find the success rate of the idea before investing your precious time and hard earned money? READ MORE

What is the meaning of a new study showing that innovation is low priority in U.S. firms today?

Back in 2013, I noted the report from three distinguished professors at Harvard Business School—Michael Porter, Jan Rivkin and Rosabeth Moss Kanter—with the startling conclusion that America had lost the ability to compete in the international marketplace. READ MORE

Newtown, Ohio, on the out-skirts of Cincinnati. The sky’s still dark on this drizzly winter morning, but innovation guru Doug Hall’s headquarters–a 157-year-old, three-story, 29-room structure immodestly named the Eureka! Mansion–is already a furnace, glowing from every window. READ MORE

The classic method of segregating innovation to a single department, or to a process led by specialists, just isn’t fast enough any longer. What’s needed is a culture in which innovation is the mission of everyone, everywhere, every day. What’s not understood is how to do it. READ MORE

Doug Hall, who tours the country teaching executives and employees how to unleash their creativity, has a message for Corporate America. READ MORE

Doug Hall has been helping companies like Chrysler and Coca-Cola develop hot new products for years. Now he’s reinventing himself — with a new venture that will bring the secrets of new-product creation to small companies everywhere. READ MORE

There are no cattle at Eureka! Ranch. There are no horses and no lingering dusty prairie. And when the sun sets in the west, it’s far from the West. But that doesn’t matter. READ MORE

Best Marketing Book to Generate Tactical Ideas
Two Winners
Meaningful Marketing (Doug Hall)
Could a book generate too many ideas? This one might. Seriously, if you are a marketer in search of tactical ideas – read this book. READ MORE

You can hardly turn around these days without running into some sort of reference to innovation. Dozens of books about the topic line the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble, from The Art of Innovation to The Myths of Innovation. Innovation is rapidly becoming the latest business buzzword. READ MORE

It’s just past 8 a.m., and Doug Hall hops on stage at the Cintas Center to start his two-hour seminar.

He begins with the catch phrase he’ll likely say too many times to count over the next six months: READ MORE

Doug Hall — inventor, entrepreneur and the person once dubbed by caustic “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell as “the most annoying man in America” — will teach two courses in the fall at the University of Maine in the minor he helped create. READ MORE

Stephen Schwarzman knows what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, to try to scrape together a company. READ MORE

THIS FALL, third-generation University of Maine alumnus Doug Hall took a sabbatical from his job as CEO of Eureka! Ranch, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and took up residency at his alma mater. His mission: Help make Maine the No. 1 state in the nation for innovation-driven economic development. READ MORE

A manufacturing company in this town was honored Wednesday for a commitment to innovation that has led to it becoming a global leader in the manufacture of equipment and precision instruments for the neuroscience community. READ MORE

The energy ratchets up the moment innovator extraordinaire Doug Hall takes the stage at the University of Maine conference center. Stepping to the microphone before a crowd of 200 attendees in the earth-toned banquet room, Hall begins a presentation that’s something of a cross between a late-night infomercial, a religious revival and a university economics class. READ MORE

Don Snyder is in the business of getting people to buy into his ideas — literally.

Take, for example, the $500 he received in a Brightidea.com competition for his suggestion that Sears Kenmore design a rechargeable ice chest that plugs into your refrigerator. READ MORE

After 20 years as Cincinnati’s antic, iconoclastic idea guru, Doug Hall has come to a brilliant new realization: All that stuff he said about brainstorming and jump-starting your brain and creativity is, um, wrong. READ MORE

Make no mistake: Doug Hall is a huge fan of both the University of Maine and the state of Maine. READ MORE

Traditionally, innovation and inspiring people to think differently occur in-person during “brainstorming sessions.” It’s an assumed truth that if you need to really stretch and create, nothing beats eyeball-to-eyeball events where you can riff of others, talk disconnectedly and feel the energy. READ MORE

A lot of companies throw the word “innovation” around, but very few actually know how to do it – or do it well. In his book, Driving Eureka! Problem Solving with Data Driven Methods and the Innovation Engineering System (Clerisy Press, October, 2018), Doug Hall shares a way to not only operationalize innovation throughout an organization… READ MORE

The root cause of innovation waste is due to the application of the wrong style of project management during development. READ MORE

Eureka! Ranch Client, Servatii’s Pastry Shop gets noticed for their Growth through Innovation. READ MORE

For 35 years, I consulted with global corporations on the selection and development of intrepreneurial thinking within corporations. The theory was that if multi-nationals could get just a few people to think entrepreneurially a transformation in business results would result. READ MORE

Want to prompt creativity? Make someone unhappy. If people are happy, there’s no need to change. But if people are faced with others’ or their own distress, they will work to find creative ways to bridge the gap from bad to good and unhappiness to happiness. READ MORE

Almost everyone accepts the importance of innovation. Why then do most organizations do it so poorly? That’s because innovation is generally random, haphazard, one-off and outside the norm. READ MORE

The most important lesson to those seeking to innovate is to learn how to fail fearlessly. Yes — I said — fail fearlessly. As part of my interview series on the five things you need to know to become a great author, I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug Hall. Doug Hall started his “invention” career at age 12… READ MORE

To create, communicate and commercialize an innovation requires a lot of money. The money can come from your existing company, from outside investors or from your own savings. READ MORE

All entrepreneurs are inventors. But some are better at it than others. Meet Doug Hall, 42, author of Jump Start Your Business Brain (F&W Publishing) and CEO of Richard Saunders International Eureka! Ranch, a think tank outside Cincinnati. READ MORE

News Flash: Innovation is no longer just a specialist’s job. What’s needed to keep up in today’s digital and global economy is a culture in which innovation is the mission of everyone, everywhere, every day.  READ MORE

Shielding your innovations is almost as crucial as the innovations themselves. Here’s how to do it. READ MORE

The classic method of segregating innovation to a single department, or to a process led by specialists, just isn’t fast enough any longer. What’s needed is a culture in which innovation is the mission of everyone, everywhere, every day. What’s not understood is how to do it. READ MORE

For those of you who’ve been watching the show American Inventor, it’s hard to escape the quirkiness of Doug Hall, the eccentric, often barefoot, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing judge who’s been described in our weekly episode recaps as the “loose cannon” of the show. READ MORE

When Pepsico began searching for new products to develop, the feisty beverage maker turned to a little-known corporate lab – Richard Sunders Inernational, after Ben Franklin’s pen name for help. The result was Crystal Pepsi. READ MORE

Curiosity and its business translation, “innovation”, are within all of us. They often show when we embark on a new job or career. Sadly, they also often wither away as the days, weeks, months and years grind on. The purpose of this article is to give you three simple principles for reigniting the spirit of curiosity and innovation that you once had and have now lost. READ MORE

When it comes to innovation, business leaders should not wait for inspiration to hit, says Doug Hall, founder of the Eureka Ranch in Newtown. READ MORE

Inventor, Doug Hall’s track record includes Crystal Pepsi; his arsenal includes water cannons and elf suits. Does the Fortune 500 stand a chance? READ MORE

The organization also selected the innovation-focused Eureka Ranch President Doug Hall to receive an award for “innovation and entrepreneurial capacity.” READ MORE

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The University of Maine’s Foster Center for Student Innovation, with funding from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, has launched a unique internship opportunity that will link Maine college students with new and growing companies. READ MORE

The corporate-friendly nonconformist is wagering big that his new Web site will connect inventors with companies and spur innovation. But at $2,000 a pop, who’s gonna buy in? READ MORE

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Before his talk, the keynote speaker at the Rockford Chamber of Commerce Manufacturing Appreciation Dinner kicked off his Birkenstock clogs. READ MORE

A record number of community leaders gathered Friday for the 12th Maine Downtown Conference, which provided a boost for area businesses while highlighting the annual symposium’s efforts to revitalize the state’s economy. READ MORE

Creating a world-class bourbon is not magic. All it takes is disciplined cycles of creation, research, learning, and recreation. This approach was refined and validated by our sister company, the Eureka! Ranch, over the past 40 years working with tens of thousands of companies, from multinationals to craft startups. It’s also how we win awards with our craft distillery, Brain Brew Custom WHISKeY in Newtown, Ohio. No matter what size distillery you run, you can use good research practices to improve your products’ taste and sales. READ MORE

Greetings. In this four-part series, we’ll explore a new outlook to accelerating innovation in a corporation. In this first installment, we glean lessons from history and encapsulate how and why those past executives—responsible for innovation—met with success or failure. READ MORE

An urgency to ignite a step change in collaboration between the Thinkers and the Doers in our organizations struck me recently as I walked the shore of New London Bay on Prince Edward Island, Canada. READ MORE

INVENTORS and companies like to court each other. Inventors need companies to move their ideas forward, and companies need inventions to help their businesses grow. READ MORE

The classic method of segregating innovation to a single department, or to a process led by specialists, just isn’t fast enough any longer. READ MORE

Over the years we’ve observed that focusing energy on developing deep belief among a few people is the best way to create a culture of innovation.  Research by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute confirms this. READ MORE

EVERY time a new product arrives in a supermarket, it comes with a long history, starting with somebody, somewhere, who hoped that this item would satisfy some deeply felt need. And make a million. READ MORE

“They’re Here!” Executives from Gardetto’s, a Milwaukee-based snack foods company, stream through the doors of Eureka! Ranch. READ MORE 

Doug Hall knows exactly what he’s up against. “You go into small business to be your own boss,” the corporate creativity guru says. “So the last thing you need is some guy from Ohio telling you how to run it.” Yet here he is, on a gray, wintry day, acting as part cheerleader, part guidance counselor to Doreen Sark, whose five-year-old business barely broke $100,000 in sales last year, down 10% from 1999. READ MORE

On ABC’s American Inventor, Doug Hall is the offbeat judge who’s walked across the stage barefoot (in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt) and who threw his support behind an aspiring inventor who eventually was picked by TV viewers as the show’s top winner. READ MORE

When Doug Hall was employed as Procter & Gamble Co.’s first and only “master marketing inventor,” he wore jeans and sneakers to work. After P&G circulated a memo proclaiming that inappropriate attire, he switched to shorts and sandals. READ MORE

Thirty years ago I “retired” from corporate life and founded what’s now known as the Eureka! Ranch in the basement of our home. The Ranch has achieved great things — inventing for the likes of Walt Disney, Nike and American Express; publishing seven bestselling books; producing two network TV shows; and creating a new field of academic study known as Innovation Engineering taught on and off college campuses. READ MORE

Nobody likes to lose. Disruption moves like a tremendous shape shifter through our businesses and organisations, continually changing the stakes and redefining the rules. READ MORE

Over the years, we’ve observed that focusing energy on developing deep belief among a few people is the best way to create a culture of innovation.  Research by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute confirms this. They reported, “…when just 10 percent of an organization holds an unshakeable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority.” READ MORE

Process Equipment Co. had a fine history of innovation. Founded in 1946 by Emmert Studebaker, a member of the famous car-making family, PECo sold laser welders and other specialized equipment to GM and other manufacturers. That brought in dependable revenues of $40 million a year. READ MORE

Johnnie Walker Blended Scotch Whisky is doling out cash grants to ordinary people with extraordinary stamina and mettle. Find out why this company thinks now is an essential time to keep plodding on. READ MORE

When you’re at the top, there’s nowhere to go but down. Although this was the predicament wind-chime maker Island Winds reached at the end of its decade-long monopoly, never underestimate the power of perception. READ MORE

Executives from Gardetto’s, a Milwaukee-based snack foods company, stream through the doors of Eureka Ranch. A two-man zydeco band cranks out early morning Cajun tunes. READ MORE

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Richards Industries CEO Bruce Broxterman led a group of managers last year in buying out Gil Richards, the 50-year owner. READ MORE

Invention is Doug Hall’s life. In his teens he created and sold magic and juggling kits, and today he is familiar to millions of viewers in the United States as an acerbic judge on the reality TV show ”American Inventor” READ MORE

Why ex-P&G exec and Eureka! Ranch founder Doug Hall is putting his substantial credentials to work helping P.E.I. artisans buff up their marketing skills. READ MORE

There’s a tale that circulates around Eureka! Ranch about Doug Hall cutting the tie off of an executive from one of the nation’s largest beer producers. READ MORE

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Truly, when I wrote my last column back in May, I thought I was done with the university president role. And I have to report that retirement — all two days of it — was great. READ MORE