Ambition Matrix: What It Is and How To Use It
Creating an innovation strategy means improving what you currently offer and finding ways to differentiate from your competition in the future. This is easy in principle, but applying this practice to your business can be very difficult.
How Online Whiteboards Create Actionable Results for Businesses
To run a successful business, you must be able to complete individual and shared tasks regularly and reliably. One of the most significant components to achieving this is making sure you create actionable results in your meetings, conversations, and workflow.
How to Create a Competitive Advantage Through Innovation
In the modern world of business, innovation is both an equalizer and a differentiator. It can give tiny startups an edge over global conglomerates and enable industry leaders to develop competitive advantages.
Is Communication Sabotaging Your Ability to Innovate?
Avoid these four communications landmines as you navigate the stages of innovation.
What is the Process for an Employee Innovation Challenge?
A growing trend over the past several years has been to host internal innovation challenges. Companies do this because they find it’s an excellent way to find solutions to long-standing problems, positively create culture (particularly in a remote workplace), and also to nurture the budding intrapreneurs who want to find career growth and new opportunities.
3 Ways Real-Time Financial Data Drives Business Intelligence
Finance is no stranger to using data in predictive analysis, forecasting, and more, but what can real-time data bring to the table?
Top Five Challenges When Pitching a New Idea
Hardly an innovation event passes without mentioning how Kodak passed on the digital camera or how Blockbuster decided not to invest in streaming entertainment. But with the rapid rate of disruption, how do you ensure that great ideas can penetrate established organizations?
4 Ecosystem Strategies for Digitalization: Insights from the Swedish Mining Industry
Orchestrator, dominator, complementor, and protector: these are four ecosystem strategies toward digitalization. In this case study, we look at an equipment supplier wanting to participate in digitalization initiatives of its industrial customers, so it must configure an ecosystem strategy to align with multiple partners.
How National Culture and Policy Impact Innovation Strategies
National cultures and policies influence innovation rates, approaches to innovation, and funding. Here's what innovation leaders need to know.
Calculating the ROI of an Idea: Ideas That Saved Time
Crowdsourcing and open innovation initiatives are vital by bringing vast stakeholders together to share ideas on complex problems and opportunities. Much of the focus is set on engaging the crowd yet deciding which ideas to take a risk on requires data on the likely impacts and costs.
What to Tell Your Boss When You Make the Case for Innovation Management
The term “innovation management" has been around for a long time (at least since the 1980s – if not before), but for many business leaders establishing a sustainable innovation management program is still a new concept. Executives aren’t sure what skills they need, who should be on their team, what activities are essential to success, and who they need to partner with.
Whitepaper: Stimulating and Measuring Open and Cross Innovation
As two intermediaries from Hamburg that foster open and cross innovation processes, Science Scout (an initiative of Hamburg Innovation) and Cross Innovation Hub (Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft) joined forces to start a discussion around the stimulation and measurement of open and cross innovation processes.
What is the New Model for Innovation Success?
In this series I’ve been critically examining the significant changes impacting the corporate innovation competency, which leads to how organisations drive future growth and impact.
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.
Try Double-Handed Innovation
Most new products and services are developments or combinations of existing offerings. But just adding features can lead to a product overloaded with ‘feature bloat’. Instead try giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Add something different and take away something of little value. Start by focussing on the market leading product (or products). List its top features and identify the benefit which customers get from each of the features. What problems are solved and how important are they? Then prioritise the list. From a customer perspective which are the most valuable and least valuable features? You may need input from a survey or focus group to help at this stage. Ask what features could we add [...]
6 Ways to Innovate Your Business Model
The pandemic has given us all an opportunity to build a new business future. Market disruption equals opportunity for those willing to look and work for it. This is the time to adjust and innovate your business model to market conditions.
What Do Innovation Maturity Assessments Have in Common?
Building a repeatable model for innovation is a journey, not a trophy. An innovation department builds services and competencies across multiple disciplines – from research to communications and culture. And even with a dedicated innovation department, they must cooperate seamlessly with other parts of the business in order to deliver meaningful results on an ongoing basis.
Customer-Centric Innovation? Sure, But With Which Customers?
Today, putting customers at the heart of innovation is a no-brainer for most business managers. However, should the innovation process involve all customers or only specific segments? In this article we explore the hurdles of these initiatives and propose a method to select the most relevant customers with whom to innovate.
Four Ways to Innovate Right Now
While the pandemic has been difficult for all us economically, as business owners, we never run out of opportunities. No matter the business climate, there is always a chance to do something new and something better—you just have to find it.
Five Aspects of Innovation Governance
The leverage point is to let innovation shine via effective governance discipline, but not adding too much complexity. In this article, we'll look at what innovation governance is, and practices to help you manage a successful innovation program.
A Successful Approach to Corporate Innovation: ‘The 8 Ps of Innovation’
The business environment is becoming increasingly complex. Organizations have lived in a stable environment for many decades. The competitive advantage resulted from executing better than competitors. This is no longer the case.
How Mind Mapping Boosts Your Creativity
Everyone has the power to be creative, but how can you bring your innovative thoughts to life? Discover how Mind Mapping can unlock your creative potential in this article.
Five Innovation Practices for Building & Managing an Innovation Program
There is no “one size fits all” formula for innovation management success. Demystifying innovation takes experiments and practices. In this article, we'll explore five tactics to use in order to develop and manage a successful innovation program.
Recession, Innovation and Survival – A Lesson from Kellogg’s
In times of severe recession should you cut costs and focus on survival or take the opportunity to invest in innovation so that you can benefit from the eventual recovery? Let's have a look at a case study of Kellogg's, which took a leap to invest in a new type of cereal - and that paid off even in the face of extreme adversity.
Digital Transformation and Its Impact on New-Product Management for Manufacturers
For the manufacturer undertaking new-product development, Digital Transformation means smart new products with embedded software. Digital products in turn require software and hardware development teams to work together – a hybrid project – which ultimately leads to combining software development methods with the more traditional gating process that manufacturers use.
What Makes You a Great Product Manager? 4 Tips and One Extra
For the past 11 years, we’ve worked with product managers and helped them to perform better. We know their challenges and we know their worries and needs. For this reason, in this article, we want to share some tips that make their life a lot easier.
3 Ways to Reduce Costs While Maintaining Business Integrity
Integrity is regularly considered one of the top characteristics that a business leader can have — whether you're asking employees or CFOs. Sometimes, however, business integrity is considered a cost or burden — a commitment that is almost guaranteed to make a business harder to run over time.
5 Tips to Create a Strong Product Vision
Every startup and growth-oriented business needs to focus on innovation in order to come up with compelling brand stories and messages, engaging products and services, and amazing marketing tactics that will put the company on the map and allow it to become an authority in its niche.