Author Archives: Eugene Ivanov

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About Eugene Ivanov

I help mission-driven organizations, including nonprofits, solve persistent strategic, operational, and organizational challenges through AI-supported problem solving. As founder of INSILICONOVATION, I build and apply AI tools that think with you, not for you—helping uncover root causes, surface assumptions, and turn ambiguity into clear paths forward.

Are ideas plentiful and cheap?

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

  We often hear: ideas are cheap. “Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless,” claims a 2013 article in Forbes. As a prevailing point of view has it, innovative ideas are plentiful; it’s the idea … Continue reading →

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Innovation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Balancing startup success and failure: how VC investors can tip the scales

Posted on September 10, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

Recently, I’ve come across an interesting paper, “Tolerance for Failure and Corporate Innovation,” published in 2011 by Xuan Tian of Indiana University and Tracy Yue Wang of University of Minnesota. Tian and Wang studied the relationship between venture capital (VC) … Continue reading →

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A crowd inside

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

When you read the original (and, in my opinion, still the best) definition of crowdsourcing proposed by Jeff Howe in 2006–“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally … Continue reading →

Posted in Internal Innovation Networks | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The wisdom of crowds in a flash

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

(This post has originally appeared on Edge of Innovation) There are two important rules of running a successful crowdsourcing campaign. First, a complex problem or a task should be divided into a set of smaller, more manageable pieces; each of them … Continue reading →

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The strength that comes from within

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

                                  This post has originally appeared on the Cultivate Labs Blog  As crowdsourcing becomes more widely adopted as a corporate innovation tool, the spotlight … Continue reading →

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Internal Innovation Networks | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

One more time about “culture of innovation”

Posted on July 11, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

My previous post, “The “culture of innovation:” misnomer, oxymoron, myth or chimera?”, has caused a lively discussion in a number of LinkedIn groups. Approximately half of the commenters were sympathetic to my claim that the very term “culture of innovation” … Continue reading →

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The “culture of innovation”: misnomer, oxymoron, myth or chimera?

Posted on June 28, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

In the opening piece of the Summer 2017 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, Paul Michelman writes about diminishing importance of corporate culture in the age of networked enterprises. Obviously, not everyone agrees with Mr. Michelman, and the whole discussion … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

From a Spark to raging fire. (How Liberty Global got its corporate innovation right.)

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

(This post has originally appeared on Edge of Innovation) So many companies struggle with their corporate innovation programs that it’s important to identify and celebrate “success stories,” as there still aren’t many cases of organizations that get corporate innovation right. One … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Innovation, Innovation, Internal Innovation Networks | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Crowdsourcing expertise from “generalists”

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

Recently, I came across an interesting article—and it was its title, “Why Experts Have Killed Innovation,” that attracted my attention. The author, Joshua Krook, a doctoral candidate in law at University of Adelaide, points out to the rising specialization of … Continue reading →

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Innovating on Facebook

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

Customer feedback represents a rich source of ideas for product innovation. However, the traditional methods of customer feedback collection– surveys, focus groups and ethnography–are labor-intensive and costly, so that only large and resource-rich firms can take full advantage of this … Continue reading →

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