Leadership of Innovation as Defined by Women in Business

Leadership of Innovation — Cleo Spencer writes about how business women define leadership of innovation

By Cleo Spencer

SEATTLE – July 2, 2013

On June 10th, WIN Ignite Innovation Forum focused on how leadership and innovation meet. One of the guest igniters, Sharon Wong said, you can’t have one without the other. “Leadership to me is about enabling and empowering the teams of people who need to drive the innovations that you want to happen,” Sharon said. The best leaders of innovation create a safe space for innovation – creating while balancing risk taking with the prospect of failure – amongst your team.

Additionally, for a leader to create “innovativeness” in others requires innovation within oneself as well. Lara Feltin, another guest igniter, said, “A good leader requires constant self-improvement and evolution.” She spoke of how placing oneself in challenging and risky – often uncomfortable situations can result in the discovery of new skills, finding opportunities to innovate within Continue reading Leadership of Innovation as Defined by Women in Business

Famous Women Innovators You May Not Have Heard of

Famous Women — Petra Volna, PhD, writes about famous women

By Petra Volna, PhD

SEATTLE – June 25, 2013

Kristiina Hiukka, the founder of Women in Innovation, likes to do a short quiz when meeting people: “Can you name a famous woman significant for her innovation?” Interestingly, she would add, most people come up with one famous woman over and over again: Marie Curie. As Jane Lee has most recently argued in her National Geographic article, this may be due to the past long-standing trend that women were not recognized for their discoveries and over time their work was assigned to their colleagues holding senior positions who were almost exclusively men. Or maybe their discoveries didn’t find their way to various textbooks as yet. I’m cautiously optimistic that this will happen, as women other than Marie Curie have been awarded the Nobel Prize and also thanks to outlets like WIN. Here are three women Continue reading Famous Women Innovators You May Not Have Heard of

Innovating at the Seams

SEATTLE – June 20, 2013

Innovation at seams The June 2013 Ignite Innovation forum was a rich conversation with a brilliant group of women business leaders discussing the topic of “Leadership of Innovation”. Jean Brittingham, COO of Katerva introduced the concept of “innovation happening at the “seams”. This metaphor provides us a way to think about innovation as a natural process of evolution found in nature where many different species and voices come together at the edges of the forest to create something new.

In the middle of the forest, Jean stated, the environment becomes stable and often too homogeneous to produce new thriving growth. In the way of big forests corporations can become barren of innovation. But they can create fertile “seams” for innovation by mixing the internal and external stakeholders for diversity of perspectives.

This nature metaphor plays in Katerva’s leadership model, Continue reading Innovating at the Seams