What Do Innovation Maturity Assessments Have in Common?
Building a repeatable model for innovation is a journey, not a trophy. An innovation department builds services and competencies across multiple disciplines – from research to communications and culture. And even with a dedicated innovation department, they must cooperate seamlessly with other parts of the business in order to deliver meaningful results on an ongoing basis.
How Can You Use Gamification to Boost Innovation?
A serious game based on innovation methodologies can be an extremely useful tool at different phrases of implementing innovation in a company. Let's take a look at how to implement gamification into your innovation strategy.
Why Experiential Marketing Is A Must In 2020
Consumers are no longer excited by traditional commercials, including display ads, banner ads, and native ads. In fact, these ads are causing a pandemic known as “ad fatigue” and symptoms range from disinterest, boredom, and more. The problem is worsening.
Demystifying the Path to Technology Partnerships
There is often a considerable amount of ambiguity at the outset of open innovation partnerships. Quite often, the technology customer is considerably larger than the provider and is being pursued versus being the pursuer. The technology provider almost never knows the full extent of what needs to be demonstrated in order to earn a customer's business commitment. They are also quite often reluctant to ask so as to avoid offending the other party or seeming ignorant or unsophisticated. How can this situation be improved?
How to Create an Innovation Mission Statement
Often individuals and organizations tend to get stuck in the mode of talking about innovation and/or trying to understand innovation. The only way to really know innovation is to do innovation, and learn from your mistakes along the way. In this article Harun Asad suggests preparing an Innovation Mission Statement as an initial, action-oriented way to get out of the rhetoric trap.
21 Situations When you Should Not Innovate
With an abundance of innovation success stories circulating the net and popular business publications, when do we hear about the other side of the coin – when is innovation not the answer to our organization's problems? Gijs van Wulfen provides 21 examples of when we should avoid innovating. What are your experiences?
10 Tips for Successful Innovation Teams
Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. This article provides a collection of ten tips that serve as a talent management roadmap for growth companies in search of high-performance teams that deliver.
Can Companies Sidestep Disruptive Innovation?
Can companies sidestep or blunt the effects of disruptive innovation? It's possible, but not likely, explains Steve Denning in a recent Forbes column.
A New Approach to Manage Disruptive Innovation in an Environment of High Uncertainty
Existing methods for the management of innovation projects have a low probability of success in the development of radical or disruptive innovations. A new spiral approach has been developed that provides the balance of flexibility and control needed for a repeatable and successful approach to disruptive innovation.
The Role of Social in Innovation Strategy
In a recent SAP Community Network post Harun Asad mentioned innovation as one social strategy. In this article he explores the role of social in innovation strategy more broadly, and cites several real-world examples as well as shares some predictions for the future.
Growing B2B Services: 3 Trends to Act Upon Now
What does it take for companies to market new, innovative capabilities as a service? The challenge to expand beyond products is daunting, but as market exemplars show, the returns on the investment can be worth it. The case studies explored in this article illustrate the extent to which services demand a premium in the market, drive differentiation from the competition, and build loyalty.
Product Innovation: Unifying People, Processes and Tools
Product innovation is not simply about generating new ideas. It is a complex process, and many organizations struggle with the design and implementation of an effective innovation strategy that yields measurable results over the long-term. Sustained growth and profitability can be achieved through the integration of three critical levels: People, processes and tools.
The Idea Game Helps Teams ‘Battle’ to Produce the Best Ideas
The Idea Game is a new group brainstorming tool that corporate teams can use to generate fresh ideas and insights. Developed by Swedish creativity consulting firm Realize AB, it provides a variety of creative stimuli using a card deck and game board to generate ideas, and "idea battles" to help identify and improve upon the best ideas.
5 Ways Small Businesses can Innovate Like the Big Guys
In traditional thinking, being competitive in the global marketplace requires a significant investment in time and resources. But the reality is that any organization today can take advantage of open innovation to innovate faster and cheaper than ever before, positioning them as true competition in the industry. This article will explore the top five ways SMEs can leverage open innovation.
How to Build Your Innovation Skills
In the 21st century economy, having strong innovation skills is critical. This year, instead of the proverbial New Year’s resolution to lose weight or get a new job, why not commit to building your innovation ability? This article discusses the urgency for building your innovation skills, and outlines some simple and effective ways for doing it.
How to Break Out of the Commodity Trap: A Lesson from Mickey Mouse
Look at almost any industry and you will see companies struggling to differentiate what they have to offer from everything else in the marketplace. So it’s hardly surprising that one of the most common complaints I hear from senior executives is “My product is becoming commoditized. Is there a way out?”
How to Implement Radical Business Models
To be successful in radical business model innovation requires companies to go beyond the traditional modeling: ideas are only one part of the innovation equation. Business model implementation requires structural changes in your organization; otherwise, you will just get stuck with a beautiful model on paper.
Innovation’s Silent Killer
If they want to compete successfully in the future, companies should hold off on rapid ideation and faster commercialization until they take an unflinching look at what is truly stifling breakthrough innovation. In this article, Soren Kristensen provides insight on how honest self-reflection can free you from your biggest impediment to growth.
What is Business Model Innovation and How Can you Implement it?
Business model innovation is a potentially powerful strategy for growing your business in the current recessionary economy. In this article, Jeffrey Baumgartner provides a helpful overview of it, and outlines some ways in which your organization may be able to leverage it.
How Design Thinking Can Enrich Business and Marketing Innovation
Design empowered innovation combines the best of right and left brain thinking. It has the capacity to deliver better ideas, with more relevance, realized earlier. By focusing on individuals, moments and journeys in ethnography, insights become deeper. By embracing chaos and play in brainstorms, creative teams can explore further. By iterating and early prototyping, ideas become real and develop more rapidly.
Why do Most Products Fail? 3 Techniques to Leverage Hidden Needs
Many managers want their organizations to develop breakthrough products and ask their R&D departments to come up with the equivalent of the iPod or iPhone. Unfortunately, the reality is that product failure is more common than success. So what are the reasons for product failure and what steps can companies take to avoid it?
How to Accelerate Open Innovation Initiatives with Disruptive Technology
Global companies focused on open innovation can accelerate corporate innovation strategies by partnering with a select set of early stage, disruptive technology providers. The result can accelerate open innovation initiatives to fulfill existing market needs or to access new market opportunities while leveraging intellectual resources from outside your organization.
Pulp Innovation XXXVIII: Innovation Strategy Change
When Accipiter suddenly changes game plan from a skunkwors to an innovation community, Marlowe barely has time to catch his breath before starting to advise on the new structure and goals.
5 Steps to Increase Innovation Skill Sets
"This company needs to be more innovative!" Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But what happens next? Because a true change in how innovative a company is must also reflect a change in the skills of employees that are related to innovation. Which, of course, begs the question: Is innovation a skill set that all employees can acquire? Can employees that are not innovative learn how to be? And, if so, what are these skills? How are improvements in them measured? In this article Dr. Mark Juszczak attempts to provide HR practitioners with some guidelines and a background into the competencies linked to innovation and the extent to which such competencies are teachable.
4 Key Success Factors That Can Enable a Higher Return on Innovation
In a slow or no-growth environment, we know successful innovation is absolutely essential for companies to establish and maintain a competitive advantage. While that may be yesterday’s news, achieving it is hard work. How can you achieve high value from your innovation initiatives? In this article Adi Alon discusses four key success factors that can help you get a higher return on innovation.
How to Leverage Results from your Research and find Buried Treasures
Every year hundreds of millions of pounds are spent on consumer and market research. All those involved in NPD will know how a myriad of research projects is deemed fundamental. Yet, managers across the globe may be wasting a good portion of their research budget. Learn more on how to leverage research results and create new opportunities in this article by Bryan Urbick, Chairman of Consumer Knowledge Centre.
Analytics Spur Competitive Advantage and Bottom-up Innovation
Before getting to this stage, 44% of organizations say the primary barriers to enterprise-wide analytics adoption are cultural. IBM Institute for Business Value and MIT Sloan Management review released research based on a survey of more than 4,500 business leaders from more than 120 countries and a variety of industries.
Innovation Versus Vision
Truly innovative companies do not aim to be innovative. Rather they relentlessly strive to follow a unique strategy, says Jeffrey Baumgartner.