Hugh Molotsi

The following article was published on LinkedIn Even though just about every company purports to care about innovation, not all companies are equal.  Some companies have innovation superpowers - that is, they consistently deliver breakthrough innovations making life next to impossible for would be competitors. Google is one such company that seems to possess innovation superpowers, especially when it comes to their money-printing search engine.  Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the PageRank algorithm and launched their company in 1998, Google became the search engine of choice, a mantle they haven’t relinquished in the almost two decades since.  This is not because people haven’t been gunning for Google. They’ve managed to keep raising the bar on their search engine in a way that competitors haven’t been able to match. Panama Take for instance the story of Project Panama. This story starts in June 2000, when Yahoo!, not realizing the strategic si...

The following article was published on LinkedIn Perhaps the most under-utilized assets in most companies are the ideas in their employees’ heads.  As many companies strive to be more innovative, jump-start their stagnant growth, and improve employee engagement, they overlook one fundamental truth: Frontline employees are more likely than senior executives to come up with game-changing innovations .   This is because frontline employees are more likely to be working with customers and working on the products that customers use.  Executives are more likely to be spending most of their days in meetings with other executives.  The every-day experiences of frontline employees provide them the insights on unsolved customer problems and ideas for better solutions. The evidence of these “hidden assets” is most apparent when employees leave a company to launch their own startup to turn their ideas into products.  In many of these instances, these start...