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.
Five Principles of Innovation Measurement
What gets measured gets managed. Innovation is not serendipity; it’s a managed process of transforming novel ideas to achieve their business value. You can only manage what you measure.
The Four Forms of Crowdsourcing
There are four ways to crowdsource answers to your innovation challenges: garden variety crowdsourcing, distant expert sourcing, expert targeting, and force multiplying.
Design Thinking: A Social Technology That Fosters Innovation
Enterprises need to innovate to stay relevant amidst technology advancements, a competitive business environment and demanding customer expectations. Design Thinking shows the way.
4 Ways Data Can Drive Workplace Innovation
The amount of data in our world is exploding, which means data sets can be a little tricky to analyze. However, for those able to harness this beast, big data can prove a gold-mine for innovation in the workplace.
Five Perspectives of Innovation Management Maturity
The success of innovation management is never an accident; it’s a holistic management process with an iterative thought-out planning and execution continuum.
Spotless: An Innovation Roadmap
Bridie Scott is an Innovation Manager at Spotless and she’s taken the business on a journey from a large-scale company with big goals to a company that is listening to and empowering all of their frontline employees in the innovation process.
How Can You Use Gamification to Boost Innovation?
A serious game based on innovation methodologies can be an extremely useful tool at different phrases of implementing innovation in a company. Let's take a look at how to implement gamification into your innovation strategy.
Why Experiential Marketing Is A Must In 2020
Consumers are no longer excited by traditional commercials, including display ads, banner ads, and native ads. In fact, these ads are causing a pandemic known as “ad fatigue” and symptoms range from disinterest, boredom, and more. The problem is worsening.
Innovation Via the Customer Journey
Innovation is usually spoken of in relation to products, research, and development. However, every aspect of your business can be innovated. In fact, one of the most important – and often overlooked – is customer service. Innovative customer service helps you build loyalty, encourages repeat business, and can also bring in new buyers as they observe how you care for your consumers.
Five Takeaways from Our Innovation Conversation with Clorox
IdeaScale hosts a monthly podcast with innovation leaders, intrapreneurs, and other game changers out there. This past month our interviewee was Dr. Navin Kunde who currently leads the Open Innovation group at The Clorox Company, a US-based consumer goods company in the Fortune 500.
Tips for Established Businesses to Survive the Startup Surge
So much has already been said about what smaller, fresh companies need to do in order to gain a competitive edge in a well-developed market, but how often do you think about what those well-established businesses should do to achieve the same?
How Do You Define INNOVATIVENESS? Getting it Wrong Could Cost You
Underlying an innovative culture driven by an innovative leader is innovativeness. Innovativeness drives business growth by increasing innovation opportunities.
Do You Know Your Company’s Implementation Rate?
With the rise of the innovation department, numerous organizations are focusing their attention on their company’s ideation rate. A good ideation rate generally predicts other positive company health indicators: profitability, higher employee retention rates, reported customer success, but there’s another innovation health indicator that we think organizations should pay attention to: their implementation rate.
Start Here for Creative Leadership
How can leaders fight apathy or indifference in the workplace and create an environment where creativity and innovation can naturally flourish?
The Power of Crowdsourcing as a Service
The Food and Drug Administration in the US has a lot of responsibility to protect and advocate for consumers. And one department in the FDA, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), regulates over-the-counter and prescription drugs, including biological therapeutics and generic drugs.
The Five Factors That Drive Digital Innovation
Innovation is the core activity of human evolution to change the environment, reach high performance, and make collective progress.
Use This Template as a Calendar for Innovation
One of the reasons why so many crowdsourced innovation programs struggle is because it is difficult for innovators to gather, process, select and implement ideas on a continuous basis.
Addressing Business Innovation Gaps to Achieve Growth
Industry leaders recognize the importance of innovation in product development and business processes. Investing in the latest innovation seems like an ideal step forward, but it’s also a risky investment for anyone concerned with ROI. This can apply to anything from technological upgrades (and requisite training) to a change in management structure.
Three Steps to Becoming a Data Leader
In the aftermath of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), businesses aren’t crying out for data superheroes; but for a complete, well-drilled data army. According to Gartner's Research Vice President, Mario Faria, 90% of businesses will employ a Chief Data Officer (CDO) by the end of this year. However, in a world increasingly governed by data, it is no longer the sole responsibility of a c-suite to ensure compliance – every individual is equally accountable for protecting consumers’ privacy.
A Strategic Approach to Starting a Successful Innovation Program
I’ve recently been advising a range of leaders in how to start successful innovation programs. A couple are relaunches of efforts that were abandoned in the past, and others are starting from scratch in organizations (and sectors) that are more comfortable with the status quo.
The Resource We Give to Everyone Launching an Idea Management Program
Our customers are launching new campaigns every day. They’re solving problems related to process inefficiency, performance, sustainability, workplace environments, and beyond.
Five Insights of Breakthrough Innovation
Breakthrough innovation is not something everyone can accomplish. You have to systematically develop the capability to execute it successfully, and that is something you do not achieve overnight.
A Strategically-Focused Innovation Process
Many people assume that creating new ideas is the beginning of the innovation process, but actually that’s not true, according to Langdon Morris. He explains that ideation occurs in the middle of a disciplined, strategically-focused innovation process. In this article, he outlines an 8-step innovation process that promises better results than the traditional 'spray and pray' approach to developing and managing ideas.
6 Mega-forces of Change that Affect Innovation
Today, there are six essential forces that are driving the changes that are occurring across much of today’s world. While these may not be the most pressing issues for your company, chances are that some combination of them will have a significant influence on your situation, on the strategic choices you make and thus on your approach to innovation.
A Lesson for Building your New Business Opportunity Case
Many would-be innovators share a common frustration: persistent difficulty in gaining traction for their new ideas with the people they need to cultivate in order to advance them. Why do they often struggle? There are numerous reasons, but a common one is that they all too often rely on opinions to make their case instead of applying facts and data.
The Dawn of the Innovators
It's time for innovation leaders to get out of 'zombie mode' and claim a strategic position in their organizations.
Get Innovative in Helping Employees to Accommodate Change
You can find in this article a grasp overview of reasons for change in our organization and how it could be boosted by applying innovative approaches.
The Perils and Possibilities of of Crowdfunding
Just because you can create a crowdfunding campaign for your next Big Idea doesn't mean you should, as book author Glenn Fleishman recently discovered.