Five Questions to Answer Before Crowdsourcing
As the director of the IdeaScale Crowd community, I recently had the opportunity to share some insights and best practices for innovators who are new to crowdsourcing, and may not have conducted their first campaign yet. We discussed five questions to ask as you prepare for your first campaign, why those questions are important, and some examples of good and bad answers to those questions.
ODI Practitioner Insights: An Interview with Marco de Polo from Roche Diabetes Care
It is quite rare for a company to open up and offer a true and detailed insight into their unique practices and experiences on their path to becoming more customer-centric. However, Marco de Polo from Roche Diabetes Care does exactly this in this interview with Martin Pattera.
Landscape Monitor for Startups
Entrepreneurs deal with high levels of uncertainty; probably more than any other business. The more disruptive the startup, the higher the level of uncertainty. Will the customers buy? How do we reach them? Will we be able to sell at a profit? Will our partners do their part? Who is out there that we can learn from? Are there threats that we are unaware of?
How to Design a Provocative Creative Challenge
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Product Innovation: Unifying People, Processes and Tools
Product innovation is not simply about generating new ideas. It is a complex process, and many organizations struggle with the design and implementation of an effective innovation strategy that yields measurable results over the long-term. Sustained growth and profitability can be achieved through the integration of three critical levels: People, processes and tools.
Five Dimensions to Conceptualize Your Idea to Make it a Successful Innovation
When conceptualizing a new idea, it is essential to direct the thinking to specific dimensions and search answers to certain questions to help evolve the idea from the initial thought through the various stages of innovation. This article suggests a framework for conceptualizing an idea and helps develop an understanding of the dimensions and questions that you need to consider.
How Next-Generation Social Technologies can Help Drive Innovation
Product innovation is about developing and delivering the “next” product or service-to-market quickly and cost-effectively. A well-managed innovation process that meets customer demands for new and unique products and services can contribute to creating a competitive advantage and business growth. Organizations can improve their innovation processes through the use of next-generation social technologies, says Catherine Constantinides.
Stop the Reckless Brainstorming and Focus your Creativity!
In their desperation to be innovative, companies often brainstorm themselves into idea overload, generating ideas that ultimately are failures. But what if companies could focus those brainstorming efforts and develop an efficient, targeted process for creativity? InnovationManagement asked Tony Ulwick to share his thoughts on how to leverage the creativity and get a better outcome.
How to Master Innovative Leadership
Innovation obviously requires creativity. That much everyone agrees on. However, it has a secret ingredient that must not be left out: Leadership. All innovators have to play leadership roles, whether they are in formal executive positions, or quite the opposite. In this article Alexander Hiam delves deeper on how to master innovative leadership.
Building Your Innovation Toolbox for Successful Co-Creation
Innovation management has become one of the most critical factors contributing to sustained business growth. Co-creation is an extremely powerful driver of innovation provided that you manage the process and harness social technology. In this article Catherine Constantinides takes a closer look at the different tools you need to consider to be successful.
How to Create Compelling Brand Experiences
Crafting design strategies that result in truly compelling brand experiences, products and services demands a change from traditional methods. It requires a more creative and iterative design approach, which is optimized towards identifying real human needs and addressing them with meaningful experiences. Paul Noble-Campbell delves deeper into five critical keys to uncovering those true success drivers.
Understanding and Exploiting Innovation Ecosystems
Do we have too static and rigid a view of innovation? It should be all about dynamic connections, imagination, experience and the interconnection of people and machines. In short it should be about identifying, understanding and exploiting innovation ecosystems, says Eunika Mercier-Laurent, author of The Innovation Ecosystem.
How to Make an Ideas Community Work: Defining the Roles
Ideas communities are a hot topic but do you really know how to make them work effectively? Doug Collins brings his experience as a community manager to bear on the roles and resources needed to catalyze great ideas.
Immersive Virtual Worlds as Innovation Platforms
Can you improve the innovation process as well as reducing the cost of engaging with users, developing new ideas and prototyping and testing solutions by making use of virtual environments? Jeffrey Philips and Jena Ball point the way.
Modeling the Resource Requirements for your Collaborative Innovation Program
The cost of doing innovation is a key factor in enterprise decision making but open innovation and collaborative innovation have a short history – so how do you go about modeling the cost of launching a collaborative or open innovation program? Doug Collins lays out the territory.
What Are Innovation Ecosystems and How To Build and Use Them
The innovation ecosystem is not new but it certainly has many new features. Jorn Bang Andersen looks back at the evolution of the innovation ecosystem, where it is now headed and how companies can develop ecosystem strategies.
Freeing up IP for Innovators: A New Role for Universities is There for the Taking
Universities and higher level research institutes need a better way of getting innovations into the market and that means taking risks earlier in negotiations. IP management systems designed for early disclosure could be the answer, argues Maxine Horn.
How To Make Your Ideas Actually Happen
Over the past three years companies have invested heavily in generating new ideas. So how do you make new ideas happen? Scott Belsky shares some of the secretes of successful rainmakers.
What’s Next? Extending the Success of the Collaborative Innovation Team to the Larger Organization
Companies that invest in developing strong innovation teams in their core product areas can extend that skill to other parts of the organization – Doug Collins looks at the skills your innovators are now developing and how they can be repurposed and extended.
An Open Innovation Reference Framework: Reducing Innovation
Can we bring an open collaborative spirit to understanding, describing and prescribing innovation methods? Paul Hobcraft and Jeffrey Philips believe we can and that it will greatly simplify the innovation process.
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.
Eric Von Hippel on Innovation: Rethinking the User as Innovator
Eric Von Hippel has long been an advocate of user-led innovation but it is not always clear what user-led innovation really means. A newly released study on consumer innovation by Von Hippel reveals more than you might think. Haydn Shaughnessy delves deeper..
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.
Changing Mental Models to Make Innovation Work
We see a lot of programs being run in companies in the name of innovation. Of course some of the large corporations need to run innovation programs for name sake. They need some window dressing for analysts and industry observers lambasting the same for not being innovative enough.
Learning How to Use Design Thinking
Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes and even strategy, according to Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. But what is design thinking? This topic was explored by 70 people in a workshop hosted by PIEp, a Swedish academia-based nationwide initiative to increase innovation capability in organizations.
Students Innovating for Emerging Markets
Existing technologies, such as telecommunications, are often designed for the developed world. But an innovative focus is also urgently needed to address issues in developing countries. This is something that the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, has acted upon and is sending students to Africa with the purpose to identify needs and develop innovative solutions. Read more in this interview with Professor Margareta Norell Bergendahl.
The Need for a New Product Development Process
This is the third part in a series of articles that take the need of innovation under the loop and share some of the imperatives, must haves if you will, to create and sustain “NEW” in business or organizations. This article focuses on the new product developing process.
Achieving Success in the Fuzzy Front End Phase of Innovation
Activities in the front end of the innovation process are often difficult to anticipate, overview and perform. Yet they are critical to successful outcomes of the innovation process. In light of a growing managerial interest in the front end, this article identifies key success factors for managing the front end, balancing acts which innovation managers need to address, as well as key contingencies affecting front end activities. Proficiency in the front end is indeed no easy task, but will have an enormous positive impact on performance for those firms that succeed.