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 [...]
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.
Getting a Better Return on Your Innovation Investment
In its latest Global Innovation Excellence Study Arthur D. Little provides hard evidence on which innovation practices separate top innovators from others within and across a wide range of industries. The study zooms in on the relationship between innovation success - based on impact of innovation - and innovation performance - based on a comprehensive framework which breaks down innovation activity into different areas and looks at adoption of best practices in each – and is available as an online toolkit. The toolkit is readily accessible and provides valuable feedback on innovation performance as measured against peers, including opportunities for improvement.
Do-it-Yourself Open Innovation: Start By Looking In the Mirror
To succeed in a fast-paced competitive global economy, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) are increasingly adopting Open Innovation (OI) management strategies. A lack of resources, however, frequently requires SMEs to implement OI strategies on their own without the assistance of a management strategy professional. This article offers clear, do-it-yourself steps to initiate an OI program successfully within an SME.
How to Unseat the Incumbent
Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?
From Chaos to Control: New Research Reveals the Global State of Resource Management and Capacity Planning
In the newly released Resource Management and Capacity Planning Benchmark Study, research is identifying best practices to avoid wasting resources on the wrong opportunities, leading to profit loss and missed market windows. Read more about the results from the study and how you can assess your company’s maturity level, determine what challenges you face, and leverage best practices shared by mature, successful companies.
Breaking the ISE: Mashup for Innovation Success
Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.
How Can You Reuse Solutions From Other Industries?
Innovation is often more about combining what is already there than reinventing the wheel in a creative manner. In this article you will learn how to apply solutions from other industries to your problem at hand by using… metaphors. This method I am about to present is called Metaphor Safari and is based on professor Ikujiro Nonaka’s theory on knowledge management.
What’s That Smell? Skunk Works® Meets Collaborative Innovation
The front and back ends of innovation test us in different ways. At the front end we wrestle with, “What problem is worth solving?” At the back end we wrestle with, “How do deliver something that offers greater relative advantage than the next best alternative?” The back end can test us the most. We tap fully our potential for leadership to produce something new—something that, in its newness, disrupts the status quo. In this article, innovation architect Doug Collins explores the link between the Skunk Works®, a successful approach to the back end developed during World War II, in the context of today’s approach to collaborative innovation.
Be an A-Tension Seeker: Why Good Ideas Stem from Irritating Problems?
All too often we see companies coming to us with a new technological advancement that they are very excited about. Sadly, having a new technology does not guarantee a winning innovation. One needs to work hard at the front end to understand what the consumer needs and how the current market offer isn’t meeting those needs. Only against this backdrop can we hope to bring an idea to market that will be truly disruptive. The following article explains.
How To Become A Business Model Architect
Our first article in this series, titled “Include Business Model Review as a New Year Resolution”, described a method to reveal weaknesses in your business model. So, what do you do next after you complete your business model assessment and find weaknesses in one or more of its cornerstones? You find Value Accelerators (VA)™! VA’s are specific and market-proven ideas, assets or strategies that directly accelerate revenue and profit growth. This article discusses how to develop, assess and prioritize the best VAs to strengthen weaknesses in your business model. It also gives you a link to download an example of a scorecard to help prioritize the VAs.
How to Emerge from Crisis by Knowing your Innovation Growth Opportunities & Competitors’ Strengths
Companies sometimes behave like the ostrich with their head in the ground while others emerge from the crisis like a phoenix. Not knowing with which new products or services your company really earns money is a bit like the ostrich. However there are effective means to gain transparency on innovation spending without too much effort. These tools also allow a comparison with your competitors to understand what they are doing differently in their approach to successfully managing their innovation activities. Finally, they help companies which currently struggle with the economic situation to become more effective and efficient in their innovation management.
In Loving Memory of Traditional Strategy
Traditional Strategy, the dominant model of doing business for nearly half a century, is fast becoming a thing of the past, pushed aside by the fast-moving forces of social business - which include innovation, collaboration and co-creation.
How Crowdsourcing Impacts Innovation Portfolio Management
In this in-depth article we present how Open innovation meshes with crowd sourcing, drawing on ideation, market needs and opportunities, to fuel a balanced portfolio with actionable innovation challenges, or « the right things to do », and converges these with a need driven approach to source the ways of « doing things right ». We will illustrate this innovation continuity with a number of examples and a focus onto the food and drink industry.
The Supremacy of Innovation
Successful programs like TQM, Balance Scorecard and Six Sigma dramatically improve quality and performance. They are designed to rightfully calibrate the hard asset issues of production. There is a serious lack of three dimensional modeling for soft issues, like innovative thinking and the dimensions of the core vision itself enveloping all production issues. These image supremacy rules challenge current methods and offer checklists to assess the need of newer, softer and special agenda-centric approaches.
How to Develop your Innovation Management Consulting Business in Tough Times
Companies become increasingly restrictive in their consulting spending, especially during times of economic crisis, where the return on the investments on consulting services is questioned and carefully considered. Consulting in the area of innovation management is even more under pressure as it is usually much lower on the CEOs’ agenda than e.g. restructuring or general cost-cutting. Therefore, innovation management consultants face the challenge to develop their client base, be effective by providing the right recommendations and be efficient by developing these recommendations in as short a period of time as possible. Mastering such a challenge seems like searching for Columbus’ Egg in innovation management consulting.
Making Ideation a Part of the ‘Innovation Project Machine’
Why is the way we work with ideation so different than the way we normally execute projects? This article argues that the two ways of working can be combined into an ‘innovation project machine’ that more effectively captures new ideas and executes innovation, inspired by agile project management and with learning for managers.
Why Bother about Innovation Strategy as SMEs?
There is discussion about how much effort should be put into developing an innovation strategy especially by small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Aren’t many successful innovative offerings just a result of trial, error and finally good luck? Insights in more than 1,500 SMEs from the IMP³rove database demonstrate that strategic focus helps secure profitable growth by innovation.
Using a War Room to Create Pervasive Innovations
Your teams did their market research. They ran an array of consumer insight sessions. They found the customers’ real Need. They ran professional ideation and storyboard sessions. They created prototypes and performed market tests. They developed their go to market strategy. They executed their plan. Product sales fell dramatically short of expectations. Why? What did they overlook?
Creating Innovation Value: Four Key Drivers to Success
The ability to increase business value through innovation is a critical success driver for most organizations. The markets that we operate in provide both opportunity and risk from an innovation perspective as they are rapidly changing. This article takes a look at a useful framework; The Innovation Diamond™, that examines the complexity and addresses some of the challenges in product innovation.
Q&A: Value-driven BPM in Innovation
An interview with Mathias Kirchmer, one of the authors of Value – Driven Business Process Management: The Value-Switch for Lasting Competitive Advantage, published by McGraw Hill. Mr. Kirchmer is the managing director for Business Process Management at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.
Driving Innovation by Corporate Venturing: How to Master Governance and Culture Challenges
Corporate venturing is becoming an important tool for big companies to complement internally driven innovation activities. However, becoming a serious player in corporate venturing requires governance principles and creates cultural dynamics which do not fit into existing corporate environment easily. This article discusses those challenges in detail and suggests ways how to deal with them.
Fostering Innovation through Effective Risk Management
Risk management can provide visibility, analytical insights and governance that can help companies better manage and optimize their innovation portfolio. In this article Adi Alon and Ken Hooper look at learnings from the VC industry and risk management practices to provide three principles that can drive higher return from an innovation investment.
Random Word Brainstorming: A Simple, Powerful and Effective Ideation Technique
Word lists, because of their simplicity, are often overlooked as a tool for brainstorming. That's too bad, because they can be quite powerful and are very easy to use. They leverage the mind's awesome associative powers to help us uncover new connections, insights and ideas.
How to Deal with Innovation Management When You Are Small?
Innovation is frequently marketed as driver of growth and prerequisite for remaining competitive. However, the process is often risky, especially for small or medium sized enterprises in search of ways to successfully manage their new products, services or businesses in a systemic and stable manner. Luckily, tools such as the “A.T. Kearney House of Innovation” are available to lend an essential helping hand.
The Seven Essential Characteristics of Innovative Companies
What makes a company innovative? Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. It should not simply be a slogan, nor an end unto itself, argues Jeffrey Baumgartner. To be truly innovative, an organization should have seven essential characteristics.
Harnessing the Power of Insight: Customer-Centric Innovation in a Changing World
Anyone has the raw capability to think of a great idea, but not everyone has the ability to bring ideas to fruition. It’s a process that requires vision, a strong handle on industry trends (both present and future) and risk takers willing to champion seemingly impossible feats. Most companies have innovators or teams of innovators with these qualities, but many don’t incorporate both customer feedback and customer observational research as key components for designing the next generation of product development. This article will explore the benefits of leveraging a customer-centric model to create more innovative, user-friendly devices that provide the support customers really need.