Scale and Impact: Supercharging The Success of Your Innovation Efforts
How do innovation leaders access additional resources to enhance the scale and impact of their efforts across complex, global organizations?
Seven Signs That Your Innovation Program is at Risk of Failure
There are plenty of examples of innovation program failure at large organizations. In this article, I examine the key markers that I have observed, that indicate a program may be in trouble and at risk of failure.
Retrospective on the Dirty Maple Flooring Company
Our columnist Doug Collins began the Dirty Maple Flooring Company tale last fall. Twenty episodes later, the story in which Dirty Maple embraces collaborative innovation has come to an end.
The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 16
In this episode, the leaders of the Idea Mill Program for Collaborative Innovation engage Dirty Maple CEO Harry Lundstrom to secure funding for the long term. How might the organization fund a collaborative innovation program—and justify doing so? What space—physical and conceptual—does this funding open for people?
6 Easy Steps to Innovate any Product
This article brings the 6 step method of AULIVE. A case study of surfboard innovation is illustrating the process.
A New Management Innovation – the Chief Digital Officer
Global business is currently undergoing one of the most significant changes seen in the last thirty years. What commenced as a computer hardware revolution in the 1980s has now given way to a software revolution that is impacting every organisation, a revolution which is accelerating at such a rate that many businesses are having difficulty keeping pace.
Is The Nordic Model For Entrepreneurship, Innovation And Export Growth About To Be Disrupted?
In 2011 The World Economic Forum had focus on the Nordic Model as a case of a region, which had came out the financial crunch better than most other regions. In February 2013 The Economist had a feature article titled ’The Nordic Countries – The Next Supermodel" stating that politicians from both right and left could learn from the Nordic countries. The question is would Schumpeter agree today?
Lessons from Public-Private Innovation Strategic Alliances for SMEs
Strategic alliances are an effective way to provide diversity of resources and gain entry to new knowledge and markets. Large corporations have entered recently into alliances with public sector organizations to support innovation in SMEs, combining private and public policy agendas. This article looks into the structure and management of these strategic alliances, their strong practices and inhibitors and how they impact the different parties involved.
Trying New Methods Is Not Reckless; It Is Essential
We are living in an increasingly litigious age. The number of lawsuits brought against the British National Health Service has doubled in the last four years. The fear of litigation and the real possibility of been found guilty of medical malpractice are inhibiting hospitals and doctors from trying promising new ideas in the treatment of deadly illnesses.
Being the Chief Innovation Officer. Amy Radin, one of America’s first Chief Innovation Officers, Shares the Lessons
Amy Radin became one of America's first Chief Innovation Officers when Citigroup appointed her to the role in 2005. She is currently Chief Innovation officer at E*Trade Financial, the leading online discount stock brokerage. Amy talks to Innovation Management about what it takes to be a head up on innovation in a major corporation.
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.
Risks of Incremental, Differential, Radical, and Breakthrough Innovation Projects
From incremental to breakthrough innovation projects, managers need to handle different activities and with them dissimilar venues of risks. In this article the internal, external and hidden risks of incremental, differential, radical, and breakthrough innovation projects are identified and ranked accordingly. In addition, for every category a general innovation eco-system has been analyzed.
The Driving Forces of Change
Six major forces are driving change in today’s world. Developing a successful innovation program requires that your organization understand and master all of them.
Open Innovation Past and Present: an Exclusive Interview with Henry Chesbrough
Though intensely talked about, open innovation remains a subject matter that both fascinates and creates apprehension among business professionals. In the following interview, Henry Chesbrough, the father of open innovation according to Wikipedia, has sat down with IM.se to discuss a few key aspects of this largely new and challenging innovation model: its evolution, its applicability and most importantly, its essential role in facilitating knowledge creation for the future. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Esade Business School in Barcelona.
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.
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.
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.
Measuring Open Innovation – 3 Key Principles to Improve Your Innovation Measurement Practices– Part 1
Thanks to loads of compelling research studies and best practice cases in open innovation (OI) carried out over the last decade, several companies nowadays begin to embrace and partially apply the new principles and methods OI offers. However, when managing open innovation at the project level, even experienced managers still go blank at the question: how to assess, control, and measure the performance of these activities? In this series of articles, we will address the above issue by discussing a general framework for an open innovation performance measurement system (Part 1). Given this framework, a metricsbased management toolkit will be presented that provides a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific set of OI methods that demonstrates the key results of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 Study (Part 2).
How to Assess an Innovation Training Program
As innovation becomes an important skill set, large organizations will seek to obtain training for their employees. We stand on the brink of an innovation training “land rush” with few rules and little information to identify the best programs. Evaluating an innovation training program is critical. Assess programs based on their depth, the experience of the trainers, the referenced body of knowledge and the inclusion of practical examples and hands-on exercises. Ignore certifications, because no standard exists.
Expanding Immersive Experiences
Virtual reality is back with better graphics, better hardware, and more applications. Several technologies will soon be released to the general market to further immerse mainstream users in their digital experiences while expanding the applications of virtual reality.
The Innovative Employee: Traits, Knowledge and Company Culture
How can a companies’ ability to innovate be improved?All innovation activity can be traced back to the behavior of employees. That makes the employee the center point of attention, if you want to improve your innovation ability. This article is built around the question: Which personal abilities and traits as well as organizational culture enable an employee to be innovative?
The Professional Facilitator as Innovation Catalyst
“Innovate or die,” heralds the Digital Age. The wise leader, mindful of the limits of the latter, embraces the practice of collaborative innovation as a way for their organization to pursue the former. Organizations, too, have professional facilitators on staff and on call. Working as an adjunct to the human resources function, they have remained largely absent from the dialogue around the practice. Innovation happens elsewhere.
Synthetic Biology Begins To Deliver
Synthetic biology moves us from reading to writing DNA, allowing us to design biological systems from scratch for any number of applications. Its capabilities are becoming clearer, its first products and processes emerging. Synthetic biology’s reach already extends from reducing our dependence on oil to transforming how we develop medicines and food crops. It is being heralded as the next big thing; whether it fulfils that expectation remains to be seen. It will require collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches to development, application and regulation. Interesting times ahead!
Rearrange the Process
If you want to innovate with a process or a service then try focusing on this word – rearrange. Describe your current process as a series of steps. Draw them out as a block diagram. Now try moving the blocks around and see where this leads.