The Essential Guide for Innovation Leaders
The Innovation Mode helps Business Leaders and Innovation Managers establish a powerful innovation function and pursue disruptive innovations, faster.
Discover unique insights, methods and techniques on how to:
Establish a Culture of Innovation
Adopt a Powerful Framework for Corporate Innovation
Manage Ideas at Scale - Powered by AI
Organize Successful Hackathons
Evaluate Business Ideas and Spot High-potential Opportunities
Convert Opportunities to Products - Define Powerful MVPs
Measure Innovation Performance
Design an Effective Innovation Transformation Program
Understand the Role and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Innovation Management
The Innovation Mode
as described by leaders across industries:
“An inspiring and must-read book for every organization that doesn’t wish to sit on the sidelines while someone else steals their share of the market.”
— Sue McGill, SVP of ATB Ventures
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read and must-use to convert the team and organization to a never-ending innovation mode.”
— A. Stergioulis, Director, Intrasoft International
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read book. Corporate leaders will get inspired and learn how to design and execute great innovation programs.”
— D. Livas, Managing Partner, Agile Actors
“A must-read to any innovation leader in their efforts to reflect and refine existing innovation activities or to set them up completely new.”
— Erik Schumb, Founder & CXO of Agile Sprints
Meet the Author
George is a visionary technologist, product architect, and innovation advisor who has helped over 20 multinational corporations streamline their innovation processes and build innovative digital products. As a 4x startup founder and inventor - with 20+ patents in Artificial Intelligence and data-driven software systems - George offers unique expertise in turning ideas into transformative products.
The Inspiration Behind "The Innovation Mode"
After observing how many organizations struggle to innovate and link their innovation efforts with their strategy, George envisioned "The Innovation Mode" as a unified framework for corporate innovation: a set of methods, techniques, and strategies that empower any company to innovate at pace.
"The Innovation Mode" breaks down corporate innovation into simple, actionable steps, enabling business leaders and managers to shape a clear roadmap and strategy for making their companies truly innovative. Drawing on his deep experience as an innovator, inventor, product manager, and advisor, George presents the tools, methods, technologies, and programs to spark creativity, foster innovation, and drive sustainable growth.
Work with George
George offers a unique approach to innovation, helping companies accelerate their innovation journey by leveraging actionable strategies from the startup world. His fast-paced and flexible advisory services empower organizations to build a powerful innovation playbook, form a “dream team for innovation,” and choose the right tools, technologies and methodologies to drive true innovation at scale. Partner with George to:
Accelerate Innovation. Fast-track your innovation efforts by adopting agile methodologies from the startup world.
Build the 'Dream Team for Innovation.’ Form a High-Performing Innovation Team with the right roles, relationships and the right talent and mindset.
Cultivate a Culture of Innovation. Make innovation inclusive and accessible and inspire a ‘community of innovators.’
Create Scalable Innovation Architectures. Design the right Innovation Architecture and technology stack that scales with your business needs.
Design an Innovation Center. Shape a new entity that inspires forward-thinking and accelerates the ‘opportunity discovery’ function of your company.
Develop Innovative Digital Products: Get actionable guidance on how to frame a problem, evaluate business ideas, shape high-potential MVPs and design product development strategies.
Work with the Innovation Mode to make your company more innovative and establish a culture that supports continuous innovation and transformation from within. Reach out to discover how our advisory services can help your business lead in the era of Artificial Intelligence.
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read book for innovation managers, top-level corporate executives, and entrepreneurs.”
— A. Tzoumas, CTO, SciFY.org
“A practical guide for how to tap your organization's creative energy, and transform it into an innovation-driven pace-setter.”
— Bart Manning, Head of Sales & Business Development, Unity
“In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the ‘Innovation Mode’ is an important read for any organization.”
— Brook Perry, Director of Marketing at ‘nuffsaid
“A tribute to innovation and its transformative power, an inspiring journey through innovation's known and unknown aspects.”
— Alex Papageorgiou, Analytics Expert, ex-Googler
Chapter Summaries
1. Innovation (re) Defined
Innovation is an overused term. The book examines the meaning of the term ‘innovation’ from various standpoints and explains its relationship with novelty and invention. It presents how innovation can be classified based on its purpose, intensity, and style and introduces new definitions to describe innovation as it happens –seen from within the corporation.
2. The Culture of Innovation
A healthy culture is one of the most crucial success factors for corporate innovation. The book defines the innovation culture and presents its core values, namely trust, safety, openness, purposefulness, curiosity, and healthy competition. It explains how they set the basis for the formation of a collective innovation mindset, and then presents the most frequent blockers
3. Fixing the Innovation Culture
Improving the culture of innovation is not easy as it usually reflects the organizational structure and attitude, the leadership style along with certain perceptions and established behaviors. The book provides guidance on how to bootstrap the cultural transformation through a series of small, inexpensive improvements targeting typical innovation blockers such as bureaucracy.
4. A Framework for Innovation
Innovative corporations are distinguished by their enhanced ability to listen to the market, spot problems worth solving and respond fast, by pursuing validated ideas and innovation opportunities. The book introduces the Innovation Framework as a set of foundational capabilities that empower the organization to enter this continuous innovation mode.
5. A Universal Model for Ideas
Ideas are essential resources for the Innovation Function. To be effective, though, ideas need solid articulation, based on a flexible, standardized model. This book introduces the Universal Idea Model as a unified way to capture business ideas and explains how it can be used as the basis of a Graph of semantically connected ideas - a new form of knowledge for the organization.
6. Managing Ideas at Scale
The ability of the organization to properly handle business ideas (spot the high-potential ones and act upon) can bring competitive advantages and opportunities for differentiation. The book introduces an agile approach in idea management – a process that treats ideas as everlasting, reusable innovation assets. It also presents a scoring model for assessing ideas.
7. The Always-On Idea Channel
In truly innovative organizations, people are encouraged to submit ideas at any time. Innovation Consumers discover ideas, just-in-time in alignment with their agenda. The book introduces a blueprint of a modern Ideation Channel and describes how advanced technologies such as NLP and AI can make ideation more efficient and impactful.
8. Ideation and Brainstorming
This chapter provides practical guidance on how to host effective and productive brainstorming sessions. It describes the typical brainstorming format used in business environments and then proposes an enhanced version powered by the Always-On Ideas Channel. It also introduces the Data-Driven Brainstorming, which instead of a problem it is guided by interesting data patterns.
9. Organizing Hackathons
A series of well-organized corporate Hackathons enrich the stream of ideas within the organization and bring significant cultural improvement. This chapter presents the options and provides guidance and best practices on how to define and run great Hackathons in a streamlined fashion. It explains how to make them more inclusive and describes how to measure success.
10. From Business Ideas to Opportunities
The ability of an organization to efficiently validate ideas is a success factor for innovation. This chapter introduces the notion of Rapid Prototyping and presents the Makerspace as the base for ad-hoc experimentation initiatives. It describes the concept of the Prototype Factory as a streamlined, concept development and validation service.
11. From Opportunities to Products
Agile engineering brings a major change in how companies build digital products and services, through a fast, adaptive, continual improvement process that naturally supports the exploration and testing of new ideas. This chapter explains how innovation and agile product development interlink and introduces the agile way of developing products.
12. Measuring Innovation
Measuring corporate innovation is not straightforward. This chapter introduces an analytical framework enabling consistent and accurate measurement of Innovation performance. With this framework, corporate leaders obtain instant insights on the current state of the Innovation Function through a single Performance Scorecard of just five scores.
13. The Innovation Transformation Program
Innovation Transformation programs are complex as they attempt to bring multiple changes across the layers and the foundations of the organization. This chapter assembles all the workstreams, projects, communication initiatives and events into a single plan. It explains how to design and execute an ambitious transformation program, that allows starting ‘small’ but also iterating fast, in an agile way. Every iteration enhances the innovation capability of the organization, improves its culture and measures the impact and the progress of the program.
Inspired? Share with Your Network
“An exceptional book – inspiring, thoughtful, and practical. I highly recommend it to corporate leaders who are keen on making their vision of Innovation a reality.”
— P. Drougkas, Board Member, Banking
Innovation Blog: Stay Ahead with AI & Innovation Trends
Our blog delivers expert advice, trend analysis, and proven strategies for innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. From AI-driven solutions to product innovation frameworks, we provide insights that can help you stay competitive and foster breakthrough innovations in your industry.
Choosing the right Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) is critical to driving business transformation and staying competitive in today’s fast-paced market. As an HR executive or business leader, it’s essential to identify a CINO who combines visionary leadership, technical fluency, and the ability to align innovation with your company’s strategic goals. This guide provides actionable insights on the key qualities, experience, and interview strategies needed to hire a CINO who will lead impactful innovation initiatives and foster a culture of creativity.