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.
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.
6 Mind Mapping Uses for Personal Productivity
With the increase of, and dramatic improvement in, mind mapping software and its emergence as a value-adding toolkit conveniently available for use on our computers, laptops, tablets, etc. signifies that mind-mapping can be used within an every-day working environment. Jamie MacDonald takes a closer look at six uses for mind mapping in business situations that most of us engage in on a frequent basis.
Open Innovation: Lego and Bagels
Arguably, the principle of Open Innovation was utilised for the first time by Professor James Murray in 19th Century Oxford, England. In the time that has passed since then, this concept has become infinitely easier to implement thanks to the development of Innovation Management technology, however some companies are yet to wake up to its potential.
Learning From Innovation Hubs: Fluidity, Serendipity, and Community Combined
Innovation hubs are popping up from Addis to Amsterdam and Boston to Bangalore. Fuelled by ideals of openness, community and collaboration, hubs aim to be the next orgware for innovation—beyond business incubators and R&D labs. Managers, policymakers and investors have taken note, but are grappling with how to engage. What makes hubs so appealing and can they teach innovation managers anything new?
What Could Possibly Go Wrong With Open Innovation?
Everyone understands the value and promise of open innovation in the business world – from brand awareness and customer engagement through to the search for fresh answers. But, truth be told, most programmes are failing to deliver results because their dynamics are too complex and the processes used are proving inefficient. A lack of relevance is also strongly affecting returns.
Scale and Impact: Supercharging The Success of Your Innovation Efforts
How do innovation leaders access additional resources to enhance the scale and impact of their efforts across complex, global organizations?
New HR and Talent Partnerships to Drive Innovation Value
As the global economy improves, many progressive HR leaders are focusing attention on better leveraging innovative activities from across the organization. The resulting new level of partnership and support not only enhance existing employee focused metrics (such as employee engagement), but also align HR / Talent more closely with generating direct financial impact and growth to the organization. This whitepaper provides a high-level overview of how these new approaches can work and steps to consider before proceeding.
Elements of a Successful Innovation Roadmap
Countless articles argue: To remain competitive, companies need to consistently build their innovation portfolio. Value-oriented improvement and new developments must permeate the business. This article discusses a structured approach, known as a Rapid Innovation Cycle, which brings a repeatable process to innovation, empowering individuals to contribute more and organizations to look beyond themselves—all leading to a higher success rate.
Should I Talk About My Co-creation Partners?
Research and practice have investigated firms’ benefits of co-creation with external stakeholders, such as more creative ideas, reduced development costs, and improved product quality. However, little is known about how consumers perceive products and their firms that communicate about such co-creation activities. Using two experimental studies, we investigated how consumers’ knowledge about the involvement of different types of stakeholders during the innovation process changes the adoption of new products.
Using Global Insights to Drive Local Innovation
“Innovation” has become yet another buzz-word, used overwhelmingly by organizations to distinguish themselves from competitors. This article explores one strategy that local champions can use to be more innovative in their local markets: scan the globe for trends and insights and generate insights and ideas that can be adapted to drive innovation at the local market level.
What Happens When Leadership Focus Shifts Away From Innovation?
Corporations tend to focus on fads, often packaged into corporate initiatives or programs, that roll in and out of favor over time. Attention from leadership around any single initiative doesn’t last forever, and it will shift to the next bright and shiny object at some point. How do you prepare for when this happens?
Innovation in and of the Board Room
Innovation and more of it has become the mantra of top management. The ability to innovate and thereby sustainably create value for the business is becoming the defining competitive advantage for companies which want to thrive in a globalized economy. So obviously, driving innovation is a key job for top management, the CEO and the C-Suite. But what about the Board? What role should it play in the innovation game – if any?
The Innovation Steering Committee as a Guiding Coalition to Change Culture
Today, meetings consume close to 40-50% of executive time. That’s 100 days per year! By some measures 80% of meeting time could be better invested in closing business, developing talent, recruiting new customers, conceiving new products or improving operations – just about anything other than gathering for another conversation without productive outcomes.
Why you Should Treat Business Model Innovation as a Fully Established Discipline
While most companies focus their innovation efforts on new products, others like Amazon and Netflix are disrupting industries with business model innovation --a cheaper, easier and more powerful form of innovation. InnovationManagement.se spoke about business model innovation with professors Netessine and Girotra, authors of the new book “The risk-driven business model”
Innovation: at the Heart of the Disruptive Machine
Can the concept of disruptive innovation be applied in a systematc way? In this article the writer/researcher offers a retrospective view of the history of innovation, its incubation, periods of economically revolutionary change and how cultural, geographic and political influences gave rise to the evolvement of global organisations. It then goes on to explain the face of innovation setting a cultural consensus that could mean for the global 2000 in terms of a new incentivised direction.
The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 18
What might a virtuous circle of collaborative innovation look like? In this episode, our protagonists Charlie and Frankie review how the design of their practice reinforces itself from strategy to planning to execution to governance.
Employees Need Direction and Encouragement to Foster Profitable Entrepreneurial Ideas
As the global economy continues its gradual recovery, companies want entrepreneurial ideas that spur growth. Oftentimes though we see a gap between what entrepreneurially-minded employees think about and what the companies that employ them want.
The Dirty Maple Flooring Company Enters the Digital Age: Part 17
In this episode, Charlie shares with Frankie a map for how the organization might track the ideas surfaced through the Idea Mill Program. Are all ideas created equally? How might we tie the right metrics to the right ideas?
Developing a Strong Eco-System Which Drives Innovation
Innovation policy is about the challenge of contributing to the wide objectives such as employment, sustainability and economic growth. How to approach such a task? The answer is simple but the effort complex: Aim for a strong innovation eco-system. Referring to the case of the IMP³rove Euromed Project the article suggests four systematic steps on how to establish an effective, innovation inducing eco-system.
7 Key Decisions Behind Innovation Success. A Roadmap to Master Innovation
As innovation practitioners, few of us would refute that decision-making is one of the biggest progress-halting problems in corporations pursuing innovation as a continuous process. This article introduces a hands-on tool to help innovators, management members and corporate boards to follow a visual, utterly practical method to “consider” (as opposed to evaluate) new projects and their possible implications in their companies’ future. The tool in turn, fosters lean communication and inclusive understanding among diverse participants, claiming that, by following its structure, innovation is not only possible, but repeatable.
Innovation Governance: Why Should Top Management Care?
In its research report “CEO Challenge 2014, ”[1] The Conference Board lists the ten most important challenges facing CEOs in 2014. Innovation ranks N°3 in this survey of 1,020 responses, on a par with operational excellence. Innovation was the N°1 issue in 2012, and in 2014 it is still the N°1 challenge in China. This article (in a series of seven) looks at the theme of innovation governance from a top management angle.
Innovating Where the Business Cares: Developing Areas of Strategic Innovation
Almost every innovation manager can recount stories of great ideas, concepts and products that people love and yet they’re never implemented. The business case stacks up and is technically feasible, but finding sponsorship and a budget seems to be impossible. As innovators, we’re often subject to ongoing commercial restrictions. The fastest way to get ideas off the ground is to ensure they’re aligned to the C-Suite agenda in both the short and longer term.
The Future of Medtech – Applying the Power of Innovation
The share of profits from new products is particularly high in medtech compared to other industries; and Arthur D. Little’s recent global Innovation Excellence study demonstrates that a high performance innovation system generates significant and quantifiable effects on profitability and accelerated time to market for new product development. This viewpoint outlines the future of the medtech industry and its opportunities as well as how to address the challenges through implementation of a well-designed Innovation Management System.
Measuring Open Innovation – a Metrics-Based Management Toolkit for Successful Innovation Teams – Part 2
How to apply metrics to open innovation (OI)? That's the question we often get from our clients when they start to develop their open innovation capabilities. In order to provide an answer to this critical question, the following article will focus on the key findings of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 study. Based on this study, a metrics-based management toolkit has been developed, which provides the most relevant key performance indicators from the perspective of innovation managers, subject matter experts, and consultants.
Placing Time on Your Side for Collaborative Innovation
Time represents the persistent, substantive constraint to being effective within an organization. Can you have a moment of a sponsor’s time to share the benefits of collaborative innovation? Does the sponsor and challenge team perceive you as respecting their time once you persuade them to pursue the practice with you?
How to Do Business Model Innovation for the Established Firm
This article provides a systematic framework for helping executives of large, established organizations identify opportunities for business model innovation and organize themselves to pursue these opportunities. While also applicable to start-ups, this article focuses primarily on how to define, challenge, and revamp the business model of an existing business or organization.