Using a Story in Innovation Work
Business is changing. To be successful in the twenty-first century, businesses in developed economies must connect with people’s emotions. This move towards greater emotional intelligence explains why “storytelling” has become so fashionable in marketing and therefore, in the following article, we will explain how you can bring storytelling into your innovation work. The aim:helping you create novel concepts that also connect emotionally.
Getting a Better Return on Your Innovation Investment
In its latest Global Innovation Excellence Study Arthur D. Little provides hard evidence on which innovation practices separate top innovators from others within and across a wide range of industries. The study zooms in on the relationship between innovation success - based on impact of innovation - and innovation performance - based on a comprehensive framework which breaks down innovation activity into different areas and looks at adoption of best practices in each – and is available as an online toolkit. The toolkit is readily accessible and provides valuable feedback on innovation performance as measured against peers, including opportunities for improvement.
7 Tips to Speed Time to Innovation
This article delves into the goals every organization should work toward to boost product development performance, looks at how these goals further a product organizations ability to bring innovative products to market, and outlines the ways that a Product Portfolio Management (PPM) Solution helps companies reach these goals.
Tap here for a Smooth Experience
As innovative brands acknowledge that content is the currency they trade for consumer attention, the big question is how best to leverage this content. To date out-of-home media to shelf talkers have relied on consumers spending a certain degree of time and effort ‘grabbing’ their content. Near Field Communication (NFC) marketing is about to change that as it introduces a disruptive new way of grabbing and sharing content, with a simple tap of technology.
How a Decision Room Can Enable Change and Innovation
One of the challenges leaders face in times of uncertainty and rapid change is helping senior managers to engage in bigger-picture thinking. To enable this process, a growing number of companies are creating “decision rooms” – dedicated areas that help them visualize challenges and opportunities from a number of perspectives and make better decisions.
Breaking the ISE: Mashup for Innovation Success
Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.
Implementing Ideas: Baby Steps
Big, crazy, breakthrough ideas seem wonderful when you are dreaming them up, but frightening when it comes time to implement them. Fortunately, the field personal development has a technique that you can apply: personal development planning (PDP). Jeffrey Baumgartner explains how to implement this approach to your innovation process.
Is Creativity the New Business Edge?
The business world is very rational. Operational excellence, financial mastery and technology savviness have become pre-requisite not to stand out as a winner but to be allowed to compete. While a hard-nosed business mind is essential to cope with the increased pressure of globalized competition, it is creativity, in the form of innovation and the ability to implement it rapidly that is fast becoming the most treasured competitive asset. Companies need to innovate in a fast yet relevant manner in order to remain competitive today and develop the game changers that will allow them to remain competitive in the future.
Packaging Innovation in the Digital Age: a Smarter User Interface?
Packaging is already a concentrated form of brand communication, expertly coded by designers using form, materials, colors and symbols to tell a brand story; or to make an innovation approachable and understandable. Now that packaging is becoming part of the digital revolution, how can we best enhance its communication potential?
Introducing New Ideas Using Analogies
Analogies can help people make sense of technological change and other innovations. Using them effectively relies on recognizing both their benefits and pitfalls.
Cultivating Innovation Champions
In order for innovation to flourish in your organization, your innovation champions must be supported through properly structured responsibilities, goals and resources. Otherwise, they will leave to pursue other opportunities, taking their energy and ideas with them. That’s one of the core messages of Gerard J. Tellis’ new book, Unrelenting Innovation.
The Surprising Connection Between Simplification and Innovation
Matthew E. May, author of the new book The Laws of Subtraction, believes if we would take a more minimalist approach to our work, seeking ways to get maximum impact with minimum effort, there would be much less waste - and much more innovation.
If Ideas are the Seeds of Innovation…
Innovation is a product of human activity. Innovation keeps life interesting, yet it begins first, with ideation: the creation of a new thought or idea. In the following article, innovation practitioner Robert Brands shares a few idea management tips to help companies get back to the business of ideation.
Hiring Creative Employees
Are you looking to hire creative employees at your company? If so, allow me to propose some characteristics you can advertise for and look for in order to find true creative thinkers. However, I also have a warning for you. But first, a little background.
How Companies Tap the Potential of Innovative Users – Examples from Germany (Part II)
While the previous two methods – Netnography and Social Media Solution Scouting – outline the potential of passive methods in using the power of social media for innovation, the next two approaches enable companies to interact with consumers. Configuration Tools as well as Innovation Contests invite users outside the company’s four walls to become an active part of new product development. In part two of this article you will learn how Audi and Henkel empowered the crowd and turned them into co-producers.
Q&A: Value-driven BPM in Innovation
An interview with Mathias Kirchmer, one of the authors of Value – Driven Business Process Management: The Value-Switch for Lasting Competitive Advantage, published by McGraw Hill. Mr. Kirchmer is the managing director for Business Process Management at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.
The Promise of Innovation Management Standardization
Previously in the Standardization Series, we argued that the worth of a management standard addressing innovation will chiefly rest on its ability to provide guidance on how to achieve sustained success through new product, service or business model development. But how will this “guidance” be generally received and which are the key drivers for the adoption of innovation management standards? The following article explains.
How to Improve the Innovation Pipeline and Process
Can an organization dramatically improve the quality, speed, and profitability of their new product projects while driving down the risk of failure? Absolutely! Organizations that rely on new products, technologies, and platforms to create customer value, grow market share, enter new markets, increase their profitability, and even alter market and competitive landscapes. In this article Chester Baker, Head of Global Innovation for Abbott Nutrition shares the winning formula for driving innovation in his company.
Jugaad Innovation
Studying how companies in the emerging markets innovate can offer Western engineers and designers important inspiration, and challenge them to develop products that are much cheaper. Such “frugal solutions” will become increasingly important in order to stay relevant in the stagnant markets of the West – as well as for the upcoming global middle class of developing countries. This study focuses on the “jugaad” innovation of India.
Sven Schade, Policy Officer at European Commission in Dialogue with Innovation Management
In connection with the new collaboration with IMP³rove – Academy, InnovationManagement.se sat down with Sven Schade, Policy Officer at European Commission, to explore how small and medium-sized entities can benefit from having increased access to innovation management tools and learning.
How Companies Tap the Potential of Innovative Users – Four Examples from Germany
Open innovation has found its way into companies’ innovation processes and is a widely used approach to spur collaborative innovation with consumers. A multitude of methods and tools have come into being, creating confusion about how to make the most out of users’ knowledge and creativity. This article provides innovation managers with insights into four popular open innovation practices at four German blue chips and contrasts the various approaches.
Preparing Ourselves for Innovation Standards
There has been a continued debate around finding and adopting a set of standards for innovation. I blow a little hot and cold on this - not dependent on the time of day but the very “force” that is pushing the agenda along. Far, far too many who push for standards often have very narrow agendas, where this fits their commercial purpose and you get the feeling that they are not as aligned to the broader innovation communities as they should be.
Systematic Innovation and the Journey Towards a Unified Innovation Management Standard
As the need for systematic innovation deepens, establishing common innovation management standards becomes a precondition for sustained value creation in all organizations – longstanding or new, large or small, public or private.
Does Encouraging Creativity in the Workplace Improve Innovation?
Let’s start by defining creativity as thinking of new ideas and innovation as implementing new ideas. The assumption has always been that if we want to deliver innovation in terms of new products, services, processes, etc. then we need lots of creativity in order to generate ideas. Creativity is the ‘front end of innovation’. It is how we fill the pipeline that generates a flow of new products. It follows that we should take actions to encourage creativity in the workplace if we want more innovation.