Author Archives: Eugene Ivanov

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About Eugene Ivanov

Eugene Ivanov is the founder of INSILICONOVATION, a consulting company that helps resource-constrained organizations diagnose root causes, surface hidden assumptions, and choose practical next steps before they spend money, time, or political capital on the wrong fix.

The dose is everything: how much labor protection is good for innovation

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

A theoretical concept proposed by Gustavo Manso in 2011 (I wrote about it here) postulates that the optimal combination of incentives that motivate employees to innovate must include tolerance for failure in the short term and reward for success in the long … Continue reading →

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The “labor law” of innovation

Posted on December 3, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

One might assume that pro-worker labor laws, due to their association with lower levels of investment, productivity and output, would have a negative effect on innovation. In fact, academic studies indicate that more stringent employment laws help firms and their … Continue reading →

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Innovation and failure: from words to deeds

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

The idea that innovation involves experimentation—and experimentation often results in failures–has gradually crawled to the forefront of our thinking about the innovation process. It became fashionable to quote Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as saying that high tolerance for risk and failure accounts … Continue reading →

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How to Cultivate Innovation in the Workplace

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

Innovation is what most businesses aim for no matter what industry. In fact, a lot of today’s most successful businesses were founded on innovation. Look at Apple and Microsoft; both companies started from ideas that seemed impossible at the time … Continue reading →

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Don’t “fiddle” with the crowd — ask it better questions instead

Posted on November 16, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

(This post originally appeared on InnovationManagement.se) As the examples of successful use of crowdsourcing to address complex technical, business and social issues grow in numbers, so do the instances of failed crowdsourcing campaigns. To make crowdsourcing a widely recognized idea-generating … Continue reading →

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Does crowdsourcing need “rethinking”?

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

  (This post originally appeared on Edge of Innovation) An article in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review describes a product development study by Reto Hofstetter, Suleiman Aryobsei and Andreas Herrmann (Journal of Product Innovation Management, forthcoming). What caught my … Continue reading →

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Bring me problems, then solutions, then problems again…

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

Innovation managers hate the line “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” They insist that before any innovation project can begin, a thorough investigation of the underlying problems must take place; collecting solutions can only start when the problems are … Continue reading →

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The numbers game

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Eugene Ivanov

In my previous post, I argued that a popular in the corporate innovation circles belief that ideas are plentiful and cheap (“a dime a dozen”) doesn’t withstand scientific scrutiny. A joint Stanford/MIT research team has presented a wide range of empirical … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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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