How COVID Impacted 2020’s Innovation Trends
Every year, IdeaScale undertakes a comprehensive audit of our system data, our customer conversations and survey data in order to develop report on the state of crowdsourced innovation.
8 Tips for Startup Entrepreneurs During COVID-19 Crisis
The coronavirus pandemic is turning out to be an international economic crisis, with ramifications for all industries and markets, similar to the crisis of 2008. A cross-border economic crisis affects companies large and small, challenging an organization's management and its employees.
Six Questions Every Leader Must Answer – If They Want to Lead Change
If you want to lead a transformation in the business, then you have to sell the idea over and over again to people throughout the organisation. In particular, the leader has to answer these questions which are present in people’s minds even if they are unspoken.
Forecasting Success in Innovation Teams
A 2012 study by the Harvard Business Review surfaced several interesting findings about the practice of innovation for the enterprise, including the innovation ambition matrix, which details how “firms that excel at total innovation management simultaneously invest at three levels of ambition, carefully managing the balance among them.”
Innovation Governance: Why Should Top Management Care?
In its research report “CEO Challenge 2014, ”[1] The Conference Board lists the ten most important challenges facing CEOs in 2014. Innovation ranks N°3 in this survey of 1,020 responses, on a par with operational excellence. Innovation was the N°1 issue in 2012, and in 2014 it is still the N°1 challenge in China. This article (in a series of seven) looks at the theme of innovation governance from a top management angle.
Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 3
The optimal balancing of radical and incremental innovation is becoming a Key Success Factor in many industries. Organizational ambidexterity is the approach to achieve this. With a best-in-class ambidextrous set-up, firms can become innovation leader.
The Role of Top-Down Management in Enterprise Innovation
Running a successful enterprise innovation management program can be a challenging mission. Multiple factors have to be considered,each of which affect potential outcomes. One key aspect is the level of support an innovation program receives from an organization’s management. Connecting the needs of top-down management with the strategy and architecture of an innovation program will always lead to greater levels of success.
Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Innovation Framework
Heidi Hattendorf, director of Innovation Development, Motorola Solutions takes a deep dive into how you can create an innovation framework at your company that will positively impact your business results and culture. The article describes seven steps that will help you implement an “inside out” approach to innovation at your company.
Tips For Quicker And More Innovative Analogies
In this article Dr. Stephen Sweid is sharing a few secrets of the analogy method that has been refined throughout the years. Suggested techniques render this method more user friendly, but also allow it to generate WOW type new ideas that are more compatible (for integration) and that work in the real world, e.g. in the market.
Implementing Open Innovation – Making It Stick
Open Innovation is becoming an essential part of an enterprise innovation strategy. Yet, so often, companies focus on getting a narrow set of tactical activities going without thinking through the strategic and organizational issues necessary to enable those activities to have the intended impact. This brief article covers a few of the implementation challenges faced by companies seeking to establish successful Open Innovation programs.
A paradigm shift for SMEs: Leveraging Sustainability as a Driver for Innovation
SMEs have sustainability on their radar. Their main goal is economic sustainability. To achieve this goal, they can take ecological and social sustainability as an opportunity for innovation instead of just considering it as a mere cost driver. Thus innovation and sustainability become the two sides of the coin called profitable growth.
Increasing Innovation Impact in the Enterprise
You would be hard-pressed to find a business leader who would question the importance of innovation not only to promote growth within their organization, but also to ensure its very survival. These business leaders have invested significantly in their innovation initiatives to support this importance. Yet a 2012 Accenture study found that more than half of corporate executives were disappointed by their innovation results and returns from their innovation investments.
Innovation: An Outside-In Approach
Every organization wants to be thought of as “innovative” and although cliché, there is something said about thinking outside of the box to help you get there. However, simply asking your employees to think outside of the box at your next internal planning session or brainstorm meeting may not be enough to get to those game-changing ideas. To get unique solutions, you need to look at things in new light. The following seven strategies are tactics that will help you take an outside-in approach to innovation, to help you come up with unexpected, richer solutions.
Managing Innovation Portfolios – Operational Portfolio Management
This is the second of two articles, co-written by Ralph-Christian Ohr and Kevin McFarthing. In our previous post, we discussed how Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) ensures that the content of the portfolio is driven by innovation strategy and associated targets. We would now like to move on to Operational Portfolio Management (OPM), where the portfolio directs resource allocation, metrics and reporting on an operational and tactical level. The link between the two is shown in Figure 1 below.
Imperatives for an Effective Innovation Governance System
In this article, the final in a series of six, Professor Jean-Philippe Deschamps, discusses the imperatives for an effective innovation governance system. Innovation performance is often not directly dependent on the type of governance model used. Rather, innovation performance reflects the strength of top management’s commitment and engagement, and the credibility, skills and energy of the actors who under take the governance mission.
Managing Innovation Portfolios – Strategic Portfolio Management
Facing increasingly dynamic and unpredictable environments, firms are required to develop convenient innovation strategies, constantly adapt them to changing conditions and properly implement strategically aligned initiatives throughout their organizations. Innovation portfolio management (IPM) can act as the pivotal tool to translate strategic objectives and priorities into project-based innovation activities. Furthermore, it provides a framework to convert raw ideas into real investment opportunities, based on their risk profile.
Stakeholder Co-Creation: The firm as an orchestrator in innovation projects
Nowadays, firms simultaneously include a higher variety of different stakeholders than ever before in their innovation process. Such a diverse collective brings in different perspectives and competences, yet, also poses new challenges for firms. This article presents insight into the capabilities required for a leading firm in a stakeholder co-creation project, acting as a conductor of an orchestra of stakeholders.
Thinking of Creating an Innovation Centre of Excellence? Think again.
Organizations create centers of excellence to distill and disseminate best practices on any number of topics. Using this approach to support collaborative innovation has certain drawbacks, however. In this article Doug Collins identifies the drawbacks and explores an alternative way to support collaborative innovation which respects the tenets of the practice by adopting principles from the Montessori Method.
Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 2
In the first part of a 3-part article series innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Integrative Innovation’s Ralph-Christian Ohr worked out why successful firms need to balance radical and incremental innovation. They introduced the concept of organizational ambidexterity as an appropriate way for simultaneously conducting exploration and exploitation, the two paradigms behind radical and incremental innovation.This second part shows some best practice examples of how the most innovative firms are setting up organizational ambidexterity.
Internal Communications, Meet Collaborative Innovation
Groups handling internal communications within their organizations experiment with engaging employees through virtual forums. These forums create space for collaboration. In time, meaningful collaboration foments a culture of innovation. How might internal communications advance this culture? How might they secure deeper engagement? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores how securing deeper commitment between organization and employee opens the door to deeper engagement.
Are you Really Innovating? Five Signs You Might Be Faking It
This article challenges companies to take an honest look in the innovation mirror to determine whether they’re truly making it or perhaps faking it when it comes to bringing innovative products and services to market. Consider this a simple litmus test to self-diagnose.
Internal and Hidden Risks of Innovation Projects
As the economy is dynamically changing and innovation becomes crucially important, a look into the management practices and risks that such projects face should always be welcome. In part two of this series of articles focused on identifying risks on innovation projects, the attention will be directed towards the identification of the internal and hidden risks of innovation projects.
Why Product Lifecycle Management Should Be On Every Executive’s Agenda!
Product lifecycle management (PLM) initiatives often miss their true potential and make projects unnecessarily costly. Not understanding how to optimize these investments can have long-term effects on both the top and bottom line, while companies that realize how to use PLM as a competitive weapon can capture significant market advantages. In this article we give you insights into how to take an approach that addresses the true potential of a PLM investment.
5 Key Points to Consider when Developing an Innovation Strategy
From our talks with innovation management practitioners and business executives it seems that not many organizations have a well-defined and integrated innovation strategy. To find out more about how to go about creating and executing such a strategy, we spoke to Wouter Koetzier and Christopher Schorling at Acceture who encourage a very pragmatic and execution-oriented approach.
Collaborative Innovation Inside & Beyond the Firm – Two Worlds Become One
This year, a very interesting trend in collaborative innovation can be observed in Central Europe: The once distinct concepts of “Enterprise 2.0” and “Open Innovation” are merging. Firms are taking a holistic view on collaborative innovation and put the question about whether collaborative innovation should happen primarily within the firm’s walls or with externals out of the focus.
Sustainability: Realizing Supply Chain Leadership through Collaborative Innovation
The Digital Age, like a hoochie mama navigating a Saturday night in heels, bares all. Citizens, regulators, employees, and investors see in real time how well organizations manage their supply chains. Transparency by nature raises the bar.
The Case of Vestas Wind Systems and Peter Drucker’s Five Deadly Sins of Business
The Nordic countries have a high number of start-up companies but are struggling with scaling their entrepreneurs, start-ups and innovations to global large-scale operations and companies. Yet, one Nordic company namely Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems managed to become world-beater within the global wind turbine industry. But but after 2008 Vestas has experienced a near death experience and is struggling for survival. Vestas’ story holds important lessons for other Nordic companies, not only within the renewable energy industry. It will here be argued that had Vestas paid more attention to what the management guru Peter Drucker labeled the five deadly business sins Vestas might have avoided getting into dire straits.
Governing Innovation in Practice – The Role of Top Management
What role does the C-Suite have in exercising the company’s innovation governance responsibilities? In this article, the last in a series of five, professor Jean-Philippe Deschamps, defines six domains that are essential to organize and mobilize for innovation. They will condition the way innovation will be carried out and sustained by the organization and hence belong to the prime innovation governance duties of the top management team.