What really makes the difference in innovation is whether the corporate culture is paying attention to innovation.

Given the increasing diversity among customers and employees, organizations that attend to cultural intelligence are more successful.

Many Westerners see follow-through and reliability as the most critical factor in how they calculate the trustworthiness of another individual. In some other cultures, who you know and how you're related to other individuals is the most important variable. And for others, it may be as much about your reputation and what others have said about you.

Clashing expectations are what most consistently derail any team, and especially a culturally diverse team. So if you take the time to define the goal carefully upfront, you've addressed one of the most difficult and important parts of the innovative process.

I never expected my graduate degrees to give me all the practical how-to's that can perhaps only be learned through the school of hard knocks.

I do think stories are one of the best tools for communicating across any number of cultures. But I also think there are wildly successful leaders who are introverted, disciplined, lead via spreadsheets and goals, and might not appear to be a great leader...but in retrospect, made a massive impact.

Culturally intelligent leaders will not assume they know what will build trust with clients or staff. Instead, they'll discover what's most important for communicating and building trust.

Smaller companies are often more homogenous. Don't simply increase your diversity because of the social pressure to do so. Instead, realize that hiring a more diverse team will give you a whole new repertoires of innovative ideas. And then develop a strategy for effectively using the diversity of your team.

May we all beware lest our innovative ideas appear very cliche before we even blink.

Generating diverse ideas requires being clear about the kind of input needed and creating multiple ways for diverse team members to share their ideas (e.g. use more than just a brainstorming session).

For me, the key question is what's behind the dangerous idea. If it's simply to stir things up and appear radical, I'm not interested. But if it's done with a quest to learn, evolve, and improve the quality of life for people everywhere, I'm on board.

The more diverse your team, the better you'll be at identifying what a diversity of users perceive as problems.

Developing an explicit decision-making process upfront for how you will make that decision will help alleviate conflict and gridlock when you actually need to decide.

The best way to improve perspective taking is to see users up close.

Culturally intelligent innovation begins with changing our impulse from Why can't you see it like I do? to Help me see what I might be missing!

Nature is good for all of us. When we're exposed to trees and other natural settings - even within the city, it fosters creativity.

Even an organization that doesn't do much work internationally will benefit from a culturally intelligent strategy to innovation. Working across different generations, business units, regions, and functions are all factors that can also influence the innovation process.

There are people who are out to take advantage of others and some who are merely putting in their time. But most of the people I encounter in the work place are desperately trying to make a difference and what to be effective at their jobs.

The better you work to find the pain point and problem facing a diversity of users, the more clearly you can DEFINE the goal when you implement the process for culturally intelligent innovation.