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Mentoring Is the Secret to Innovation Say Silicon Valley’s Top VCs and Entrepreneurs

Leapfrogging

Mentoring transforms big ideas into high-impact innovations. Having worked with dozens of the Fortune 1000 companies , coached startups, and founded three companies, I can say there’s a universal truth when it comes to innovation: big ideas are just ideas until they deliver real value to the world. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub.

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From Seed to Flower: Growing a Strong Network Through Direct Relationships

Yet2

yet2 ’s network has been built across multiple channels to include small and large companies, technical experts and scouting partners. yet2 was founded by cofounders Ben DuPont and Phil Stern in 1999. These results came early in the project and perfectly set up yet2 to provide our client with further guidance.

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Whose Job Is It to Manage Freelancers?

Harvard Business Review

And as part of a contingent staffing strategy, emerging businesses and startups can afford access to outstanding technical experts that would otherwise be cost prohibitive on a full-time basis. Others are new to managing or stronger technically than as a supervisor. Here’s the problem. Some are excellent. This is a big miss.

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Is Innovation More About People or Process?

Harvard Business Review

What’s more critical to producing a breakthrough innovation – finding creative people or finding creative ideas? It is the intensity of its people’s passion for innovation that animates IDEOs processes, he contends, forming a culture that’s “not typical, and not easy to emulate.”

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What Big Companies Can Learn from the Success of the Unicorns

Harvard Business Review

For instance, Snapchat’s cofounders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, started working together on a website for students called Future Freshman, among other projects, while at Stanford University. Moreover, the innovations lying at the heart of the unicorns’ success stories are digital innovations.

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Too Many Experts Can Hurt Your Innovation Projects

Harvard Business Review

To be sure, entrepreneurs in highly specialized and technical industries need the knowledge that only users (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like) can provide. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that innovation thrives when expert users make up about 40% of an invention team. If you need an appendectomy, call a surgeon.

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Why You May Be Blind to a Good Idea (and What to Do About It)

Harvard Business Review

So we have to use lessons from the science of attention blindness to construct teams in a way that eliminates group think (where the group rallies around one idea oftentimes at the expense of others that may have been "blind") and yields innovative new ideas they might be missing if they're not actively addressing blind spots.