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.
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.
Being the Chief Innovation Officer. Amy Radin, one of America’s first Chief Innovation Officers, Shares the Lessons
Amy Radin became one of America's first Chief Innovation Officers when Citigroup appointed her to the role in 2005. She is currently Chief Innovation officer at E*Trade Financial, the leading online discount stock brokerage. Amy talks to Innovation Management about what it takes to be a head up on innovation in a major corporation.
Negotiating Win-Win Strategic Innovation Partnerships
Recognizing that every collaborative endeavor is unique and should be evaluated on its own merits, companies must do their homework before starting to work together. Successful innovation collaborations start with a clear understanding of how each company wants to benefit from the partnership, and how they will work toward a win-win outcome. This article highlights matters to be considered and memorialized in this formative stage of a partnership.
Linked Innovation: 5 Keys to Success in Open innovation Challenge Management
Open innovation crowd sourcing methods, when applied to the right problem, can effectively extend the solution provider search beyond the boundaries of an industry. This article presents the application of a targeted broadcast crowd sourcing method to identify unobvious solution providers for a German chain-drive industry consortium. The majority of solutions submitted through this method were previously unknown to the consortium. This evaluation demonstrates the power of open crowd sourcing to provide solutions from discontinuous industries and how effective crowd sourcing can be in open innovation.
Risks of Incremental, Differential, Radical, and Breakthrough Innovation Projects
From incremental to breakthrough innovation projects, managers need to handle different activities and with them dissimilar venues of risks. In this article the internal, external and hidden risks of incremental, differential, radical, and breakthrough innovation projects are identified and ranked accordingly. In addition, for every category a general innovation eco-system has been analyzed.
Three Ways to Achieve Breakthrough Innovation
How might you foment authentic breakthroughs through collaborative innovation? The fuzzy front end, by name and nature, fails to lend itself to foregone conclusions. Yet, as the innovation practitioner, you can take certain steps that increase the likelihood of achieving breakthroughs. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the most critical steps for people who see the practice as a means of transforming the organization.
Do SMEs Lose their Appetite for Innovation During the Economic Crisis?
Innovation is always a result of taking risk and mastering these risks successfully. However, in the past few years the risks resulting from the overall economic situation seems to have increased for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). As they cannot control these external risks many of them seem to stay away from too risky innovation projects. This has implications for the SMEs and for those who provide innovation support for SMEs?
Crossed Signals: Things that Keep Us from Effective Collaborative Innovation
Sometimes we plan to go from point A to point B, but wind up at point C. What happens when point C turns out to be a dead end? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the crossed signals that can occur when organizations attempt to advance their practice of collaborative innovation, but find themselves someplace less promising.
How to Assess your Organization’s Capability to Innovate
In today’s rapidly evolving world the ability to create new value and the ability to be innovative is now more important to an organisations survival than at any other time in our history and the ability of organisations to assign the right level of resources in the right manner is a critical to creating a successful innovation practise.
Why Product Lifecycle Management Should Be On Every Executive’s Agenda!
Product lifecycle management (PLM) initiatives often miss their true potential and make projects unnecessarily costly. Not understanding how to optimize these investments can have long-term effects on both the top and bottom line, while companies that realize how to use PLM as a competitive weapon can capture significant market advantages. In this article we give you insights into how to take an approach that addresses the true potential of a PLM investment.
5 Key Points to Consider when Developing an Innovation Strategy
From our talks with innovation management practitioners and business executives it seems that not many organizations have a well-defined and integrated innovation strategy. To find out more about how to go about creating and executing such a strategy, we spoke to Wouter Koetzier and Christopher Schorling at Acceture who encourage a very pragmatic and execution-oriented approach.
What Visionary Companies Do Differently
Visionary companies do not only try to see into the future – they create the future. The history of innovation is scattered with examples of misjudgments regarding the dynamics of new technology. Less than two years before Polaroid’s bankruptcy, Morgan Stanley made the following statement: “We are upgrading Polaroid to Outperform from Neutral based on the company’s new product performance…
Leading Innovation in Multinational Subsidiaries – Part 2
The changing global economy creates special challenges for leaders of multinational subsidiaries. History shows that innovation is key to survival. This series of articles explores this challenge and offers subsidiary leaders a way to identify and implement innovative strategies to sustain local operations and create added value for their parent corporation. It also looks at how corporate managers can help drive more innovation from global subsidiaries.
Sustainability: Realizing Supply Chain Leadership through Collaborative Innovation
The Digital Age, like a hoochie mama navigating a Saturday night in heels, bares all. Citizens, regulators, employees, and investors see in real time how well organizations manage their supply chains. Transparency by nature raises the bar.
Leading Innovation in Multinational Subsidiaries – Part 1
The changing global economy creates special challenges for leaders of multinational subsidiaries. History shows that innovation is key to survival. This series of articles explores this challenge and offers subsidiary leaders a way to identify and implement innovative strategies to sustain local operations and create added value for the corporation. It also looks at how corporate managers can help drive more innovation from global subsidiaries.
How to Create Products that Your Customers Will Love
How to create innovations that customers do not expect, but that they eventually love? How to create products and services, which are so distinct from those that dominate the market and so inevitable that make people passionate? A major finding has characterized management literature in the past decades: that radical innovation, albeit risky, is one of the major sources of long-term competitive advantage. But is that really the case? Read more in this article by Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation and author of the book “Design-Driven Innovation.
Measuring Open Innovation – 3 Key Principles to Improve Your Innovation Measurement Practices– Part 1
Thanks to loads of compelling research studies and best practice cases in open innovation (OI) carried out over the last decade, several companies nowadays begin to embrace and partially apply the new principles and methods OI offers. However, when managing open innovation at the project level, even experienced managers still go blank at the question: how to assess, control, and measure the performance of these activities? In this series of articles, we will address the above issue by discussing a general framework for an open innovation performance measurement system (Part 1). Given this framework, a metricsbased management toolkit will be presented that provides a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific set of OI methods that demonstrates the key results of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 Study (Part 2).
White Space Mapping – Seeing the Future Beyond the Core
In the world of hyper-innovation every company needs to address the unknown. Idris Mootee of Idea Couture takes a look at white space mapping, a tool for overcoming your fears.
Crowdsourcing Risk and Reward – How to Evaluate Options for Success
To be upfront about where we stand, yes - we are great supporters of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd for many pursuits – for citizen engagement, open innovation, or crowdfunding. That said, we realize that it’s important to be aware of the fact that there are risks to consider. This article is a response to the concerns raised by people we meet along an organization’s path of considering crowdsourcing to fulfill a particular need for their organization or their constituents.
How Procurement Can Help Suppliers Become Innovation Partners
In this interview, award winning Jean-Baptiste Rubens – currently Head of Procurement Innovation at Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods) – describes the journey his team embarked on when realizing they were not extracting the maximum value from their suppliers. By a deliberate process where R&D needs were rationalized and dispatched to selected suppliers, the Procurement team was able to direct supplier innovation from punctual dispersed activities, to highly coordinated projects that had impact transversally across the company.
The 7 All-time Greatest Ideation Techniques
Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the "super seven" that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas.
How to Clear your Mind of Distractions and Free it up for Creative Thinking
Do you ever find that distractions get in the way of your creative thinking time? Is your mind buzzing, heading off in many different directions, sapping your energy for brainstorming? Tom Wujec, author of Five Star Mind: Games & Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity & Imagination, offers a clever solution to this common problem.
Do-It-Yourself Open Innovation: Discovering Your Complementary Partner
Open Innovation relies on collaboration to achieve success. To determine which firm is the best suited to be an innovation partner, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) should consider using an approach modeled on the “Want, Find, Get, Manage” methodology developed by Alliance Management Group (AMG). Because of their unique characteristics, broadly summarized as limited resources,SMEs should substitute “want, find and get” with “need, know and negotiate.” Capable and stable management remains a constant.
How to Shock Management into Rethinking the Business Model – Prove They can be Blindsided by a Fingerprint
Despite a detailed process with countless hours of work, and sincere efforts to take a longer-term, strategic look at where to play and how to win, many businesses fail to anticipate fundamental shifts that should cause them to rethink their entire business model. The results are often disastrous - too many businesses end up on life support. This article presents a new concept called “Competitive Fingerprints” that will allow readers to anticipate shifts and adapt their business model to capitalize on future market realities.
How to Build a Lean High Performance Innovation Team
The world we live in is changing at a dizzying rate and sectors including energy, technology, entertainment, communications, finance, sports, manufacturing and engineering are all experiencing shifts on a seismic scale. Many of the innovative advances of the past ten years, from smart phones to digital cameras have become commoditised and creativity has become the currency of success. In this article author Matthew Griffin shows how large and small organisations alike can build lean, agile, high performance innovations teams and bridge any shift successfully.
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Open Innovation in Corporate Venturing
Although plagued with mixed opinions that are influenced by mythology surrounding the investment industry, corporate venturing is finally resurfacing as an important component of the corporate innovation toolbox. As companies reassess the contribution that corporate venturing can make to their innovation objectives, it is critical that the fundamentals of corporate venturing are understood. This article addresses a number of important points to consider when applying corporate venturing in a global innovation strategy.