Design Thinking, Tim Brown
Article in the June 2008 Harvard Business Review: Design Thinking by Tim Brown the CEO and president of IDEO.  Here are the free links to some of the article: The Executive Summary and Page 1 out of 5

Your Takeaways from Marketing Retreat, cti marketing enrichment group
A summation of takeaways from a retreat.  Here are a few I found interesting:

• Develop processes so that we step into the customers shoes and figure out what really makes them tick, what challenges them, what are their pain points, what do they celebrate, etc
• Realize that we each need to have a face for our customer base. Think about that person when you're developing your resource or creating an ad. Would what you're doing appeal to that specific person?
• How do we encourage creativity in what we're doing?

RamCharan's thoughts on Innovation, RamP!
I've mentioned The Game Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan before, this blog entry by RamP! provides some great links on material about Ram Charan, a link to a video of a lecture he gave and sums up three points from an interview he did with fastcompany.  The three points that RamP! mentions are:

1. Innovation is a social process
2. Work simultaneously, not linearly
3. Kill the ideas

Some good links from the blog entry: Man of Mystery, How To Kill An Idea, Ram Charan Lecture

How Successful Leaders Think, Roger Martin
Roger is the author of The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, which I finished reading a few weeks ago.  You can read my review of it: Book Review: The Opposable Mind.  Roger's article "How Successful Leaders Think", is a great view on how people make decisions which discusses the steps and then gives examples of how Integrative Thinkers perform that step.  A good quote from the article:

Brilliant leaders excel at integrative thinking. They can hold two opposing ideas in their minds at once. Then, rather than settling for choice A or B, they forge an innovative “third way” that contains elements of both but improves on each.

Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation, Carleen Hawn
Sums up the highlights from an article in April's The McKinsey Quarterly named Innovation lessons from Pixar.  Carleen is nice enough to provide the 10 key lessons (he mentions 9 but has two number six lessons) form the article (so you don't have to buy it unless you want all the details):

1. Herd Your Black Sheep
2. Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation
3. Look for Intensity
4. Innovation Doesn't happen in a Vacuum
5. High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap
6. Don't Try To "Protect your success"
7. Steve Jobs Says 'Interaction = Innovation'
8. Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning
9. Get Rid of Weak Links
10. Making $$ Can't Be Your Focus