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.
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.
5 Reasons Why Your Company Should Innovate
Over the last few years, innovation has become a ubiquitous branding tool. Whether you are a blue-chip company or a local start-up, innovation has entered the everyday lexicon of CEOs and administrative staff. Compared to prior marketing trends, innovation is not a passive buzzword—it is critical to the success of your company.
Avoid Innovation Paralysis – Why all Companies Can and Must Embrace Change
Someone once told me this: “Innovation is like an apparition of the Virgin Mary: one person saw her, but everyone talks about it.” Although funny, the quote aptly captures an attitude towards innovation that exists in many companies today. Innovation – and the skills that enable it – are sometimes considered as mystical gifts, preserved for the chosen few. In other cases, innovation is feared, because it involves unregulated processes, risk taking and investments with unpredictable outcomes. In this blog post, I’d like to make a case against this kind of innovation paralysis. Every company must innovate, and with the right understanding of the word ‘innovation’, every company can.
Creativity is not Enough: How to Turn Ideas into Revenue
“Eureka!’, Archimedes famously howled, while running butt naked through the streets of Syracuse. Soaking in his bath tub, the bearded Greek inventor had just discovered a new method of determining an object’s volume. Funnily enough, this well-known story captures two myths about innovation. One: it’s the work of a sole – and usually slightly eccentric – inventor. Two: chance has a part to play. For businesses, the reality is vastly different. Indeed, turning ideas into revenue requires quite a bit more than just ideation and luck.
5 Emerging Trends in the Financial Sector
The financial landscape is changing and the crowd is uniquely suited to help banks and other financial institutions solve some of the challenges they face. In this article, we look at five tech trends and how they’re changing how financial institutions interact with their customers.
Why Innovation Fails (And How to Succeed)
Here’s a wild guess: the majority of large enterprises will probably claim they know exactly what innovation is all about. Yet, in spite of impressive resources, big companies are responsible for only a small fraction of disruptive innovations. What is at the root of this paradox? Why does so much innovation fail? And more importantly: what can companies do about it?
Platform Disruption Wave
In the new global environment innovation is tending towards Platform Disruption, and is more focused on waves of change than single technology disruptions. The competitive capability of different innovation cultures, rather than technology, therefore becomes the critical success factor. In this article, Haydn Shaughnessy examines product and service platforms as the new organisational form and suggests that modern enterprises need to take the leap to a new way of business.
Why Crowdsourcing is Critical to the Future of Education
Educational institutions have the reputation of being slow-moving behemoths, but this label is undeserved. According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the educational sector worldwide is more innovative than it gets credit for.
Innovation Tautogram — A Simple and Powerful Innovation Tool
The human vocabulary with millions of words is adequate to explain all of our expectations and experiences, even those which are imagined. Why not harness the power of language to discover new products and services? Author Shanta R Yapa shares the Innovation Tautogram technique, which can be used as an individual or a group exercise.
A Strategy that Requires Innovation
Every executive knows that their teams should be more nimble, should be operating at a higher speed, and should be innovating. But these are all discrete capabilities, not necessarily in service to any greater strategy, and in fact much of what passes for strategy doesn’t understand how to take advantage of these capabilities. In this article, the authors describe the Maneuver Strategy from the new book, Outmaneuver. This strategy relies on innovation to achieve its goals, rather than accommodating innovation when it must.
New Growth Opportunities Through Strategic Innovation and Business Design Thinking
All successful companies must eventually answer the same basic question: How do you establish new growth strategies and business opportunities from within your organization? The new book, The Art of Opportunity was written to help your business answer that question. The concepts were cultivated through more than 20 years of academic research and experience, providing organizations with a detailed blueprint for how to grow, innovate, and transform.
How Innovation and Authenticity Complement Each Other in a Corporate Environment
Authenticity and innovation are two of today’s biggest corporate buzzwords. They are often considered as separate values, but in reality they have much in common and in this article we will examine the areas of overlap and potential leverage benefits.
Navigating the Make versus Buy Decision: A Crowd Sourced Check List
Product managers facing the make versus buy decision for their organization have a lot to consider. Biases abound. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins shares what was on the minds of senior product management leaders on this topic when they convened, recently. Their top 10 factors follow below.
How Innovation Develops Among Individuals in Niche Social Networks
In the current digital arena, social networks have touched the lives of almost every human being on earth, allowing us to share life's novelties with friends and loved ones. However, social networks are not restricted to sharing and commenting on pictures, but giving rise to innovation among individuals to help make our world a better place.
9 Ways to Elevate Your Business Performance with Mind Mapping
How can mind mapping help businesses elevate performance and strive towards innovation? Every entrepreneur or business professional will agree that an exceptional business performance is what drives the company and exemplifies a solid base for success, amongst great competition and fast moving markets, always hungry for innovation and groundbreaking products or services.
A Compelling Value Proposition: The Missing Tool in Your Lean Startup Kit
Eric Reis first introduced the concept of Lean Startup in 2008. Today Lean Startup is deployed far beyond entrepreneurial circles and is taking root in large, complex organizations looking to improve their new product success rates – and in the process build lean cultures. This is very good news. Too often the processes corporations use in pursuit of innovation can actually erode their capability to innovate. Still, when applying the principles of “Build – Measure – Learn” to initiating Lean practices in corporations, there is room for improvement…and possibly even for a pivot.
10 Ways to Reduce the Innovation Failure Rate
You are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment, but most of the time innovation fails. Innovation process-expert Robert Cooper shows that of every seven new product/service projects, about four enter development, 1.5 are launched, and only one succeeds. Innovation is so difficult to master, indeed. I love to share with you five reasons why innovation goes wrong and give you ten ways to reduce your failure rate of innovation.
Diversity and Innovation – A Perfect Team
Please, not another business imperative! Every time I open a journal or glance at a blog it seems as though the panacea to all business ills has just been discovered and is waiting for me to embrace it! One minute I’m being told to hire for cultural fit, the next to increase diversity. It’s no wonder that employee engagement is falling because if I’m being pushed from pillar to post then it’s not surprising that my people are confused……
10 Best Board Practices on Innovation Governance – How Proactive is your Board?
All global business and technology trends point in the same direction: there is a need for more proactive and far-sighted management of innovation. Innovation for business reinforcement and growth – and for transformation in particular – are, of course, the prime responsibility of top management. Innovation governance – a holistic approach to steering, promoting and sustaining innovation – is thus becoming a new management imperative.
How does Going Public Affect a Firm’s Innovation Behaviour?
Are private companies more innovative than public companies? What happens to an innovative start-up which goes public? Will the same team of people who were so agile and entrepreneurial in the start-up become even more innovative once they have some capital and recognition behind them? Apparently not.
5 Advantages to Crowdsourced Innovation Management
At the beginning of the twentieth century, research and development was a highly guarded and elite practice. Imagine laboratories peopled by white-coated scientists who had passwords to protect the doors to their office. This kind of research and innovation was highly successful for a long time – it gave us electrocardiography, DNA fingerprinting, and many Apple products.
Design Thinking + Business Model Innovation
There has been a lot of buzz around designing new and innovative business models. But what does it mean to design a new business model? How do you apply design thinking to business model innovation?
3 Reasons Crowdsourced Innovation Is Difficult
David Alan Grier wrote in Crowdsourcing for Dummies “the hardest part of crowdsourcing is raising the right crowd.” It is one of the realities of crowd ideation that continues to hold true – that if you can’t draw a crowd to help you generate innovative ideas, then you’re not evolving beyond the traditional closed approach to innovation.
The Product of The Future
What will the product of the future be like – and how will it be different than today’s products? Generally, all products will become part virtual, part physical. They will be connected, reconfigurable and – hopefully – smart. Also, the business model for their manufacturers will be dramatically different.
Are You Focusing on the Right Pilot?
Piloting in business innovation means testing an idea effectively. This is not a straightforward process and requires addressing the right questions: What idea should we test? Which aspect of it? How should we go about testing? How should we measure the results? What do we allow these results to mean and what do we do afterwards?
Untapping Hidden Value: A New Partnership Model for Corporate Knowledge Management and Innovation Functions
In the current business environment, defined by some as the ‘Knowledge Age’, leadership interest is increasingly focused on Innovation and Knowledge Management development efforts. To date, these functions often operate along parallel, yet discrete, paths. As organizations seek new areas of growth, while further cutting costs there is an increasing need to build more effective partnerships in order to ensure ongoing success and drive additional business value.