How much time per month do you dedicate to innovation and generating new ideas? - SmartBrief

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How much time per month do you dedicate to innovation and generating new ideas?

2 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 150,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: How much time per month do you dedicate to innovation and generating new ideas?

  • A small amount (2-4 hours/month), 36%
  • Almost none, 24%
  • A moderate amount (1-2 days/month), 20%
  • A significant amount (3-5 days/month), 20%

Some of you are spending substantial time on innovation. Whether that’s new products, processes, services or operational efficiencies, your task is to ensure you don’t end up with a bloated idea pipeline with little prioritization or execution. Be rigorous in chasing the biggest ideas and focusing on those to the exclusion of the others. For those of you not dedicating enough time to innovation, you can’t compete forever that way. It’s not much to carve out 5-10% of your time every month to look at your organization through new lenses and come up with ideas for improvement. Get your heads out of the status reports, dashboards and daily operations and spend a little time thinking about the future — your competitors are.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of ThoughtLeaders and author of “One Piece of Paper.”