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.
The Top Practices That Separate Great Leaders From The Rest
How do great leaders separate themselves from the rest? This article will examine how several excellent leaders, including Rich Teerlink and Steve Jobs, were able to inspire their teams, develop incredible products, and transform their companies.
The Key Steps Innovation Professionals Should Take in a COVID-19 Environment
Obviously COVID-19 is having an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, with the scope and scale of business disruption being immense and incredibly challenging. But disruption is what innovation people are generally excellent at responding to, so the question becomes - “how do you and your team support your organisations within this environment?”
Industry 4.0 and the Internet-of-Things (IoT): Learning from the German Chemical Industry
The keyword “Industry 4.0” is no longer an empty cliché or a black box; it is currently probably the most important topic within the German economy. Not only will existing processes be revolutionized – but also new businesses and business models will arise. More and more companies have already started to tap into its potential.
Why it Takes Time to be an Overnight Success
When it comes to transformation programs, internal alignment forms the foundation for strategic success. Naturally, aligning an organisation to its strategic priorities requires serious upfront investment in terms of time. But without this time, it’s a case of ‘fail to prepare – prepare to fail’.
Innovation, Suffocation & Trump Nation
Innovation at best is like watering a nice healthy plant, making it grow and blossom; however, watering without the plant is just getting the dirt wet. Nothing happens. Currently, all over the world and with more than 100 major innovation themed events yearly, complete with great photo opportunities for local and national leadership, most nations have little to show for these super expensive efforts. It seems that we talk a lot about innovation and find ourselves stuck in the suffocation of great ideas. And, suddenly the Trump nation erupts on a high note!
Disruption Planning 2- Creating Options and Pathways
In this in-depth article Haydn Shaughnessy discusses why traditional ROI decision making is becoming irrelevant and how options planning is a key element of competitiveness. In these uncertain times firms need to recognise and analyse their options thoroughly in order to be ready for inevitable change.
High Stakes Industrial Innovation with Paul Brody
Paul Brody is a Global Innovation Leader in BlockChain Technology and a Solution Leader in the Industrial Internet of Things at EY. Paul has spent more than 15 years in the electronics industry and has done extensive research for his clients on technology strategy. Paul understands that technology is deeply rooted in strategy, but it gets complex as new technologies and disruptions arise in our modern world. For example, the moment self-driving cars are perfected, it will cause a huge disruption in our economy, so how can we navigate through it?
The Dynamism in Chinese Ecosystems and Platforms
Today we have to “think China” when it comes to looking for the dynamism within Ecosystems and Platforms. They are leading, exploring and extending the thinking beyond our more limited ambitions in the West. It is the environmental conditions coming together or being explored and exploited that make China stand out in its dynamism in this area.
Harnessing Corporate Activism To Transform A Pharmaceutical Giant with Celine Schillinger
When Céline Schillinger looked around her workplace she saw that the system didn’t value the diversity of competencies that different people could bring. They were being wasted. The system was focusing on a very narrow bandwidth of talents and always promoted the same kind of people, coming from the same background, and with the same kind of thinking. She decided to do something about it. Céline was called a troublemaker by her bosses, but thanks to her passion to grow and improve on rigid corporate systems, she was awarded Woman of the Year — La Tribune Women’s Awards in 2013. Céline is now the Head of Quality Innovation & Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Defeating the Corporate Antibodies
Change is frightening to many elements inside the typical organization. Change threatens people’s power, their status, their egos, and, in some situations, even their jobs. Change can make someone’s expertise obsolete and thereby make them obsolete as well. Because people are afraid of change, innovation efforts often cause the eruption of corporate antibodies that fight to kill innovation and maintain the status quo.
What your Definition of Innovation Says about Your Company
In a field centered around fresh, outside-the-box thinking, it is no wonder that there is such a broad range of definitions for the term innovation. Creating a clear-cut definition for the term is critical in shaping the culture of innovation at your organization and will help you determine which resources to allocate to your program.
The Next Level of Open Innovation: Is Your Organization Ready?
Getting started with open innovation and developing the right foundation for open innovation has been a key challenge at many companies in the last three to five years. Now, internal as well as external forces are moving these companies towards the next level of open innovation in which we go beyond just products and technology and start to explore how a more open and collaborative mindset can be applied to all more business units and functions. Think procurement and engineering as examples.
Multi-tasking – The Challenge of Intermediaries in SME Support for Innovation
In view of creating more competitive regions and industry sectors, innovation capabilities of SMEs play a central role. SMEs are strong economic drivers in many countries, and their ability to innovate will determine the health of national and regional economies in the future. A key support for SMEs in their innovation efforts are public innovation support programmes.
Avoid Innovation Paralysis – Why all Companies Can and Must Embrace Change
Someone once told me this: “Innovation is like an apparition of the Virgin Mary: one person saw her, but everyone talks about it.” Although funny, the quote aptly captures an attitude towards innovation that exists in many companies today. Innovation – and the skills that enable it – are sometimes considered as mystical gifts, preserved for the chosen few. In other cases, innovation is feared, because it involves unregulated processes, risk taking and investments with unpredictable outcomes. In this blog post, I’d like to make a case against this kind of innovation paralysis. Every company must innovate, and with the right understanding of the word ‘innovation’, every company can.
Opening the Floodgates of Innovation: Insights from Deloitte Innovation Day
Take a quick glance around your office. What do you see? Categorically “Start-up” types in t-shirts and jeans passing bottles of craft beer around? Or “Suits”, with their collars starched to perfection, hunched over their laptops and scrambling away at emails? What would happen if we flipped these scenarios around? I for one, would love to see my accountant rock up to work in a Hawaiian Shirt; a calculator in one hand, and a piña colada in the other. But what difference would this make?
Behavioral Innovation: The Need to Pivot, Why We Don’t and What We Can Do About It
When was the last time you seriously thought about your blue chip investments going broke? At what point will those shares be worth nothing? Although it may sound ridiculous, the question is serious because at the current rate of disruption, half of the Australian Stock Index S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years (Anthony S D et al, 2016). Where does that leave your investments?
Platform Disruption Wave
In the new global environment innovation is tending towards Platform Disruption, and is more focused on waves of change than single technology disruptions. The competitive capability of different innovation cultures, rather than technology, therefore becomes the critical success factor. In this article, Haydn Shaughnessy examines product and service platforms as the new organisational form and suggests that modern enterprises need to take the leap to a new way of business.
Six Levers For Solving The Corporate Innovation Problem – Part 3
This is the third part of a three-part article series. We are investigating why – despite all the investments made into the early phase of innovation – innovation results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. In the first part we illustrated that companies are investing heavily into the early phase of innovation. In the second part, we provided some metrics on the corporate innovation problem and found that the corporate innovation problem actually consists of a “complexity” problem” and a “system problem”. In this article, we show six levers to change the “system problem” and think this is the way to solve the corporate innovation problem – and ultimately to increase innovation performance.
Six Levers for Solving The Corporate Innovation Problem – Part 2
This is the second part of a three-part article series. In the first part we illustrated that firms are investing heavily into the early phase of innovation. In this second part we show that despite of all these investments, innovation results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. We provide some metrics and find that there are two root causes. In the upcoming third part we will suggest that six levers can be used to address one of the root causes. We believe that moving these levers can provide a solution to the corporate innovation problem – and ultimately lead to increased innovation performance.
Six Levers for Solving the Corporate Innovation Problem – Part 1
Innovation is at the top of the Management Agenda for many companies. For excellence in innovation, companies have to master the chain of activities from discovering valuable insight into unmet customer needs to successful market adoption. However, despite large and growing investments into innovation, results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. In this 3-part article series we dig deeper into this problem and find that there are actually two root causes for it. We focus on one of the root causes – the “system problem” – and work out six levers of improvement. Acting on these levers offers a solution to the corporate innovation problem and ultimately increases innovation performance.
What Effect has Digital Innovation had on the World and your Business?
The Internet has forever changed how we work with innovation. Author Marta Domínguez spent the last five years observing the causes and effects of the digital wave and has gathered a list of 22 impacts on the world and your business.
6 Ways to Avoid Employee Burnout and Foster Innovation
According to a recent Gallup poll, around 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2014. Why are employees less engaged? Some of the blame is due to burnout at work. This burnout, characterized by severe mental and physical exhaustion, is leading to a lack of interest, reduced employee engagement and less work being accomplished. Most of the theories that have been devised in this regard suggest that the main cause is too much work and strain, but this might not be the case.
Shaping the Future
Think of the future. Go on! Now tell me honestly what is the furthest point in time that you imagined. If it was three years then I’m not surprised. After all, in business three seems almost to be some sort of talisman. We have three year business plans, 2-3 year product development cycles and of course there is that ubiquitous interview question about where you see yourself in three year’s time.
How does Going Public Affect a Firm’s Innovation Behaviour?
Are private companies more innovative than public companies? What happens to an innovative start-up which goes public? Will the same team of people who were so agile and entrepreneurial in the start-up become even more innovative once they have some capital and recognition behind them? Apparently not.
Three Megatrends that will Affect Everybody’s Business
The future is hard to predict and a lot of “experts” regularly get it wrong. However, there are some facts so important and trends so inevitable that leaders would be ill-advised to ignore and not try to anticipate. Here are three of many future megatrends that will not necessarily determine what will happen, but will most likely have a big impact on everybody’s business in the coming years to decades.
Follow the Crowd or Create the Marketplace
It’s follow my leader time for the world’s stock markets. Concerns over the state of the Chinese economy have seen markets plunge into freefall, only for some to bounce upwards again a few hours later. At the time of writing, markets are still in flux with analysts divided on the eventual outcome.
Tips to Achieve an Innovative and Differentiated Startup Project
This is the era of rapid changes and disruptive innovations, and no startup, irrespective of size or industry, should be launched without a high degree of innovation and differentiation. This article is about the why, what, and the how— the systematic way to achieve this, based on the long international experience of the author, Dr. Stephen M. Sweid.