"Innovation is a hands-on issue. It calls for an intimate understanding of our current customers and markets, potential new customers or markets, team and organization competencies and improvement opportunities, vision, values, and mission. We can't develop that intimacy from a distance. Studies, reports, surveys, graphs, and measurements wouldn't do it."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Customer Intimacy and Empathy are Keys to Innovation"

"Successful experimentation means we need to kiss a lot of frogs to find that prince. As we do, we learn. So we might begin recognizing royal froggy behavior or see the faint marks on their heads left by little crowns. That may help reduce the number of frogs we have to kiss, but we still have to keep looking."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and Learning Through Successful Failures"

"In his article "Building a Learning Organization," Harvard Business School professor, David Garvin, writes, 'Experimentation involves the systematic searching for and testing of new knowledge . . . A study of more than 150 new products concluded that 'the knowledge gained from failures (is) often instrumental in achieving subsequent successes.'
...In the simplest terms, failure is the ultimate teacher."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and Learning Through Successful Failures"

"Opportunities for innovation leadership always look bigger going than coming. Using the Law of Averages, innovation leaders nurture many experiments, pilots, trials, tests, and the like at very early stages to screen out those few promising innovations they will eventually direct into their managerial mainstream."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and Learning Through Successful Failures"

"When asked why he wasn't getting results with his countless tries to successfully develop the light bulb, Thomas Edison replied, 'Results? Why, man, I've gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.'"

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and Learning Through Successful Failures"

"The flatter, more decentralized and team-based your organization is, the higher your levels of innovation will be. Head office and management need to serve the operational and improvement teams working to find better ways to produce products and enhance service. The more people feel they're running their own show; the more they'll act like entrepreneurial partners."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and Organizational Learning Pathways and Pitfalls (Part 3)"

"I first saw the Law of Averages applied to innovation in 1983 when Zenger-Miller and Achieve worked with Tom Peters to develop the Toward Excellence process based on the lessons of In Search of Excellence. It made so much sense. To double your innovation success rate, double your failure rate. Clearly, effective managers don't want to fail. The goal is not failure; it's success. But since innovation is so unpredictable, we have to "fail our way to success."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation and the Law of Averages"

"Many innovations come from a deeper level of customer and market understanding. They go beyond what current customers say they need. They solve problems that customers either don't realize they have or didn't know could be solved."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation Means Looking Beyond What is to What Could Be"

"Make sure the "voice of the market" pervades every part of your organization. Bring customers into your company offices and plants for visits, joint problem solving and planning sessions, celebrations, focus groups, conferences, barbecues, presentations, and the like. Get everyone in your organization out to see customers or into the real world on a regular basis."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation Means Looking Beyond What is to What Could Be"

"Establish active user and support networks. Provide regular face-to-face, electronic, print, or audio-video forums to help customers, external partners (like distributors and suppliers), and internal partners exchange experiences, ideas, and problem-solve. Capture and disseminate all this learning throughout your organization."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation Means Looking Beyond What is to What Could Be"

"Effective innovation depends on disciplined management systems and processes. But it starts with people. People searching for creative ways to do things better, different, or more effectively. People trying to understand how other people use, or could use, the products or services their organization could produce. That makes innovation a critical leadership issue."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Innovation Means Looking Beyond What is to What Could Be"

"Going nowhere in a hurry is a timeless leadership issue that's been with us for centuries. As the pace of change quickens, it's easier to fall into this age-old trap of confusing busyness with effectiveness."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Reflection and Renewal"