How to Select Your Best Value Innovation Project – The Secret is in a Well-Managed Product Project Portfolio!
Innovation is on everyone's lips as a solution to post-COVID economic recovery. The world of innovation has a very broad definition: It’s often referred to as an information technology innovation... but our worldwide economy is still very reliant on manufacturing. How you select your best innovation project is undoubtedly a starting point!
Frugal Banking: An Opportunity to Create Customer Value in the Future?
Investments that are necessary to innovate and serve customers are no longer sustainable while COVID-19 hastens the need to exploit the potential of digital innovations. Serving customers accurately during unprecedented times requires a new mindset and business model innovations. If banks respond to customer requirements in completely new special situations, they can gain trust and integrity and become winners of the crisis.
Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!
In a time when uncertainty reigns, the fear of being disrupted can brutally hurt any business. Responsible leaders who dare to anticipate disruption and take steps to self-inflict it to their organization in a smart and controlled way are best positioned for the future.
Open Markets and their Implications for Business Model Strategy
Kahn Academy is in the process of disrupting the long-staid textbook publishers market and K-12 education. This school is a stellar example of how any business today can thrive by capitalizing on trends that are opening markets for non-traditional competitors.
Mastering Radical Innovation – Turning Threat into Opportunity
Radical innovation presents both a threat and an opportunity to firms. It has frequently turned entire industries on their heads. History shows us that large, successful firms may very suddenly become vulnerable when the underlying technology shifts. In this in-depth article Christian Sandström examines how radical innovation can be managed, despite the seemingly insurmountable problems created by the transition from one technology to another.
Strategy as an Innovative Design Process
Unpredictable, turbulent markets and fluid industry boundaries characterize today's global economy. Yet our approaches to strategic planning, formed in the closed markets of the Industrial Age, often assume exactly the opposite. As a result, companies are mired in commoditization, industry disruptions from unexpected competitors, stalled growth, and tentative strategies. To gain the agility needed to thrive in today's complex and demanding open markets, strategy must become an innovative design process focused on value creation, says Kay Plantes.
A Compelling Example of Business Model Innovation: Finfrock Industries
A compelling example from the commercial construction industry showcases the power of business model innovation to transform your business.
Why Business Model Innovation is Critically Important Today
One of the few ways left for companies to protect their margins is through business model differentiation. According to Kay Plantes, business models have become the new basis of competition, replacing product features and benefits as the playing field on which companies emerge as dominant or laggards.
How to Harness the Value of Outsourcing-led Innovation
Companies who are engaged in developing innovation processes are also likely to be involved in outsourcing significant aspects of their operations. So how do you innovate when you've also outsourced? Sanjiv Gossain explores the issues.
Is it Time to Rewrite the Innovation Playbook: Ten New Requirements in the Age of Hyperinnovation
In the world of hyperinnovation innovation itself is changing. In place of a monolithic R&D based innovation culture we suddenly have a proliferation of innovation approaches and new pressures on enterprises to innovate. Haydn Shaughnessy and Nick Vitalari argue the innovation playbook needs to be rewritten, and relabelled.
Identifying and Exploiting New Markets in Growing Economies
The importance of new markets to growth can’t be overstated. But emerged, emerging and frontier markets are not just about growth. They are a perfect opportunity to extend our innovation capabilities. IM takes a look at the lessons of India as a product frontier.
Notes on Discernment – New Practice for the C-Suite
Executives and management leaders need to adopt a new style of engagement with their people and ideas if they are to produce the change their organisations need. Kevin McDermott of Collective Intelligence believes this new ‘discernment' mindset could alter our expectation of what senior managers do in the 21st Century corporation.
Managing Information, People and IT to Improve Business Performance
How can companies acquire greater maturity in the use of information? Ground-breaking research reveals some answers. Following an ambitious program of “field” research – involving more than 1200 managers in more than 100 companies across 26 economic sectors and 40 countries – we at IMD have scientifically demonstrated a causal link between a company’s performance and its maturity with regard to its “information orientation” (IO)
Forget your Customers and Develop Innovative Business Models!
Merely focusing on customers will not lead to groundbreaking changes in your business model. Instead, opportunities for business model innovation arise when focus is shifted to value creation for non-customers.
How Partners React to an Open Innovation Strategy
I have cited Psion Teklogix, provider of rugged mobile computers, several times on my blog for their promising approach to open innovation. Last month, the company took a big step forward with its strategic interpretation of open innovation – called Open Source Mobility (OSM) – when it brought its global partners together for a series of conferences at which they unveiled a new platform designed to give resellers and developer partners the opportunity to co-create with Psion.
Strategically Engaging Your Organization
Strategic management today must focus not only on meeting short term targets and budgets but also on building an organization prepared to succeed and lead into the future. This is obvious, you may say. But how is this simple reality reflected in how we strategically lead and engage our organizations? Read more in this article by IMD Professor Thomas Malnight.
Developing an Innovation Toolbox
InnovationManagement spoke to Alexander Osterwalder, sought-after author, speaker, workshop facilitator and adviser on the topic of business model design and innovation. Find out more about his views on innovation management, what projects he is currently working on, and why big organizations should enable their creative innovators.
How do Innovation Intermediaries Help you to Implement Open Innovation?
Up to now, several innovation intermediaries have assisted managers to transgress the boundaries from closed to open innovation and facilitated the access to opaque and highly difficult to connect technology markets. Examples such as NineSigma, Innocentive, Innovaro and Yet2.com have been specificaly helpful for technological problems requiring solutions fromom distant and distinct innovation actors. This work aims to address the lack of continuous effort to study the content, structure and governance mechanisms of these intermediaries as well as other less publicized forms such as incubators, innovation agencies, science and technology parks that further complement innovative practices. How do innovation intermediaries help you to implement open innovation?
Keeping a Constant Flow of Innovations at BASF
InnovationManagement recently spoke to Dr Thomas Weber, Managing Director of BASF’s Future Business, about what it takes for a large company to maintain a constant flow of innovation ideas and a spirit of enthusiasm to feed the pipeline.
Defining an Innovative Firm – It is Much More Than Technology
Innovation is very much the word of the moment. We hear it used in science, the arts, in politics, in society, and often for good reason. For example, the creation and building of the European Union, is one of the most innovative – and indeed frustrating – processes in history. So what actually is innovation? Read more in this article by IMD professor Georges Haour, IMD, one of the world's top business schools.
Discover New Possibilities with Reverse Innovation
Before the radical shifts in technology disrupt the industry fabric, there exists a great potential to appropriate value from the market through incremental product and business model innovations. The less intense the competition, less matured the market - larger is the potential. The emerging markets of the world the BRICs (where s could stand for the plurality as well as South Africa), have long been projected as the markets to invest in.
How to Manage in the Age of Turbulence
In times of global turbulence the role of innovation is more important than ever. InnovationManagement spoke to global strategist John Caslione who, together with marketing guru Philip Kotler, recently published their new book CHAOTICS: The Business of Managing and Marketing in The Age of Turbulence.
Collaborating Downstream in Emerging Markets
Not so long ago, internal R&D activities were considered one of the most valuable assets a company could have. The rather “outmoded” concept of closed innovation, in contrast to open innovation, was built on self-reliance and on the principle that successful innovation required control and secrecy.
Innovating by combining existing things in new ways at Deutsche Post DHL
Petra Kiwitt is Executive Vice President of DHL Solutions & Innovations at Deutsche Post DHL. The Group with nearly 500.000 employees in 220 countries provides package and mail services as well as comprehensive logistics solutions for customers all around the world. Petra Kiwitt’s biggest challenge is to stimulate and coordinate innovations which ultimately will lead to even more efficient logistic solutions for the customers. A new built Innovation Community brings people together, lets them share ideas and sometimes encourages them to do ‘old’ things in new ways.
Innovating Products, Processes and Business Models in India
Over the past few years, innovation in India as a corporate theme has constantly gained importance, becoming a prerequisite for long-term success, or maybe even survival, due to the discontinuous pace of change of the environment. Thus, innovation has now reached for some companies as a corporate priority, affecting every single aspect of an organisation.
True Innovation – The Key to Success
“There are no quick fixes and no easy answers for succeeding at innovation” says Dr Robert Cooper, senior consultant to Fortune 500 firms and top scholar in the field of innovation management (PDMA) in an interview with InnovationManagement. “It’s back to basics – an aggressive innovation strategy that focuses your businesses’ R&D efforts; effective portfolio manage to pick tomorrow’s growth engines; a climate and culture that fosters innovation in your business; and a robust idea-to-launch system.”
Reinventing Knowledge Management to Innovate
There has been a shift from the emphasis on what people called the “information value chain” to “knowledge value chain” for quite some time. The environments are shrewd and unpredictable in this world of growing competition and rapid technological progress. The information value chain just served as a database of “best practices” whereas “knowledge value chain” emphasizes on the active sense making of human beings handling business.
Ideas management: What if there are no ideas?
‘Innovation starts from the top’ is a frequently used phrase; but there are many steps involved in a successful innovation strategy. What unfortunately I too often see, and in many organizations, is a huge gap between top management thinking and the understanding in the rest of the organization about innovation. Everybody might agree that innovation is important in principle. They might even be in agreement about the particular process that could bring new ideas to fruition, and implement new thinking in an innovation. This is all fine – but what if there are no new ideas?