6 Ways to Innovate Your Business Model
The pandemic has given us all an opportunity to build a new business future. Market disruption equals opportunity for those willing to look and work for it. This is the time to adjust and innovate your business model to market conditions.
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.
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 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.
Systematic Innovation and the Journey Towards a Unified Innovation Management Standard
As the need for systematic innovation deepens, establishing common innovation management standards becomes a precondition for sustained value creation in all organizations – longstanding or new, large or small, public or private.
Searching for Needs is the Best Innovation Strategy
Is it possible that only a quarter of all companies are highly effective at the front end of innovation? If so, what kinds of companies are most successful at the ideation and conversion stages? Gijs van Wulfen describes three different kinds of companies and suggests the Need Seekers strategy offers the greatest potential for superior performance in the long term.
Customer Integration in B2B Open Innovation
Today, almost any B2B firm claims to be “customer-oriented”. However, only few firms have a rigorous and stringent system that integrates the “best” (B2B) customers into its innovation process – where “best” in this context is measured not by volume of sales but by contribution to the firm’s innovation. A lot of insight has been generated on how to engage consumers in the innovation process. There is also a growing body of knowledge about how to innovate openly on the R&D side of the innovation process. But little has been written up so far about how to systematically integrate B2B customers in the firm’s Open Innovation system. innovation-3’s Frank Mattes closes this gap by sharing some insights.
How to Survive your Innovation Project?
Sometimes the most difficult part of innovation is how to survive your innovation project internally. Most organizations that really need to innovate have a risk adverse culture and managing innovation has everything to do with managing expectations and reducing risks. Gijs van Wulfen offers seven practical tips how to survive your innovation project.
Innovators Talk Strategy for Driving Growth
As innovation leaders in industry gather to discuss the front and back end of innovation in a global context, a common theme emerges. Whether expanding to a neighboring country or across oceans, entering a foreign market is always a “beyond-the-core” activity requiring the development of new competencies. One solution: identify skills first, not people.
Neuronal Innovation – the Next Big Thing After Open Innovation
This article shows how biomimicry can be put to effective use in designing innovative networks. It builds from similarities between the brain connectome and innovation networks to lead to a novel concept in innovation - Neuronal Innovation. This new concept shows how organizations can become proficient in deploying and using collaborative innovation.
Playing to Win Means Being Willing to Lose
Inspired by Susanna Bill’s post regarding the importance of vulnerability for innovation, I was reminded of an eye-opening story from the book Sway by the Brafman brothers. This story may explain why we retrospectively look at what we have done and ask ourselves “how could I be trapped like that?” It also applies to companies that have an ambidextrous innovation strategy that incorporates both the “play-to-win” approach and the far more common “play-not-to-lose” approach.
Moving from “Open Innovation” to True Open Innovation
In the 10 years since Henry Chesbrough published his groundbreaking book on Open Innovation, a lot has happened. Almost any firm claims to do Open Innovation. However, if you look closely, most of the firms do not do true Open Innovation – they are merely running a multitude of open approaches to innovation. This article explains the fundamental differences between “Open Innovation” and true Open Innovation, provides data where firms are standing on their journey to true Open Innovation and gives some hints on what your firm should do in order to take the next step.
Anatomy of an Effective Front-End of Innovation Cycle
The Front End of Innovation is that fuzzy bit where someone, or a group, conceives a new business concept. We say “fuzzy” because it’s the part of the innovation process that is the most purely creative. It’s a step into the unknown to create something new and calls for different tools and techniques. Because it’s fuzzy, we think it’s useful to break it down and look at it step-by-step.
Managing your Brand by Uncovering Key Points of Inspiration
You’re the leading branded FMCG player in your market. You are a well-known and respected company with a long heritage of consistently outperforming other major brands. Yet, despite this heritage, you are underperforming in one market segment that is showing strong growth. Bryan Urbick explores how to capture share of a lucrative and growing market.
Establishing the Foundations for a Balanced Innovation Portfolio
Corporate innovation programs can’t fulfill their potential without the right foundations in place. Many organizations are taking their programs across the enterprise. In this article we consider three key foundations and how they can be boosted to improve corporate innovation: the linkage between every day innovation and corporate targets, the levels of openness, trust and acceptance of diverse opinions.
Innovation Method – Copy and Paste
One of the most common operations performed on a computer is copy and paste. We copy a section of a webpage and paste it into a document. We take it for granted. We grab an idea from one place and put it to use in another. So why not use this method for your next product or service 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.
Core Competence Management in the Era of Open Innovation
“Core competences” are a major concept in managing innovations and technologies. In the era of Open Innovation, the established concept of core competence management needs to be updated. innovation-3’s Frank Mattes recently met with a group of 20 innovation / technology managers from leading firms to work out how this could be done – with the practitioner’s perspective in mind. In this article you will find the key results of the discussion.
5 key Success Factors to Enable Transformational Innovation within Businesses
Transformational innovation for many businesses is inherently complex and, in many cases, high risk. It can be a big distraction, expensive in terms of cost and resource bleed from other key activities, must be managed carefully and will frequently not be successful. This article explores some key factors to work with when looking for transformational innovation.
Designing the Perfect Ideas Competition
What's the most effective way to design an idea competition that doesn't just result in a huge pile of ideas, but enables teams to implement ideas that will help to make your organization more creative? Jeffrey Baumgartner shares one practical framework for making this happen.
How to Make Business Model Innovation Happen
One of many good reasons for you to focus on your business model is that companies focusing on Business Model Innovation outperform their industry peers in terms of operating margin and total shareholder return. In this in depth article Marc Sniukas provides you with a framework to describe your business model in three easy steps; a process to start and drive Business Model Innovation within your company and an overview of tools and how they can be used in Business Model Innovation.
Creative Problem Solving Technique: Become the Problem
When we are trying to generate ideas in order to solve a problem, whether through anticonventional thinking, brainstorming or another method, we typically distance ourself slightly from the problem. We look for ideas on how to improve our company’s product, how to deliver better customer service, how to cut costs or alternative business models. In all of these cases, we separate ourselves from the problem and, by so doing, we potentially limit our understanding of the problem. Why not take a different approach and become the problem?
5 Key Success Principles – the Cure for Innovation Envy
Experience and research tell us five key success principles are seen across the cultures of ‘serial innovators.’ The good news: These characteristics can be adapted for any company, regardless of industry.
7 Key Steps to Successful Open Innovation in China
More and more Multinational Companies (MNCs) are turning to China for open innovation for several important reasons. Find out what those reasons are and learn more about best practices to succeed at open innovation in the unique Chinese market. This article delves deeper into how harvest the power of innovation from one of the world’s most populous and fastest-growing countries