Four Ways to Innovate Right Now
While the pandemic has been difficult for all us economically, as business owners, we never run out of opportunities. No matter the business climate, there is always a chance to do something new and something better—you just have to find it.
Tips for Established Businesses to Survive the Startup Surge
So much has already been said about what smaller, fresh companies need to do in order to gain a competitive edge in a well-developed market, but how often do you think about what those well-established businesses should do to achieve the same?
How Do You Define INNOVATIVENESS? Getting it Wrong Could Cost You
Underlying an innovative culture driven by an innovative leader is innovativeness. Innovativeness drives business growth by increasing innovation opportunities.
Coaching SMEs to Innovate
In this article Dr Rowan Gilmore shares lessons from the AIC’s Innovation Coaching program which was first introduced to help Queensland (Australia) SMEs in 2009. The program works with SMEs in a number of industry sectors, helping company management to “think outside the box” to grow their business or develop new products and services.
Innovating the iPod
Seldom has a single technological innovation affected so many markets at once - the music industry, hardware vendors, the labor market, artists and consumers themselves. This is the story of how the iPod was made. In a quest to make music more portable, designers and engineers at Apple got together to create the iPod. Steve Jobs, in his quintessential style, maneuvered through established, entrenched industry interests to finally price music in a way that addressed all stakeholders. An idea, however brilliant and singular, reaches perfection when many heads work together. The iPod story is as much a lesson in team collaboration as it is in decisive leadership.
How to Increase Your ROI by Measuring and Managing Your Innovation
Studies have shown that companies’ return on innovation (ROI) or hit rate is somewhere between 2-10%. That is another way of saying that around 90% of all innovation efforts are never commercialised or used in general. Jørn Bang Andersen, senior advisor to the Nordic Innovation Centre (NICe), presents a NICe case study on possible ways to dramatically change that.
Why research and development gatekeepers should serve as product champions
Open innovation R+D gatekeepers also should act as product champions. They should be empowered to recognize, build a case for, and advocate select external submissions as fledgling new business opportunities, asserts Michael Fruhling. Here's an example.
Four Approaches to Fostering Companies’ Innovation Capability
For many companies being and continuing to be innovative is essential. But how can companies become ‘more’ innovative? Carmen Kobe & Ina Goller asked experts, consultants, and managers how they experienced successful improvement of innovativeness in their business life. Out of the interviews four interventions that are used to develop companies’ innovation capabilities could be extracted.
Innovation: Understanding the Strategic Role of the End-users
How do you go about incorporating end-user viewpoints into innovation? Indeed should you? There's a debate around both questions but whichever side of the fence you are on, social science has a role to play in understanding how end-users can and should influence product development. Emma Pivetta I Contreras describes the techniques.
Strategy as an Innovative Design Process
Unpredictable, turbulent markets and fluid industry boundaries characterize today's global economy. Yet our approaches to strategic planning, formed in the closed markets of the Industrial Age, often assume exactly the opposite. As a result, companies are mired in commoditization, industry disruptions from unexpected competitors, stalled growth, and tentative strategies. To gain the agility needed to thrive in today's complex and demanding open markets, strategy must become an innovative design process focused on value creation, says Kay Plantes.
Design Thinking: The Rumors of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Recently, Bruce Nussbaum declared "design thinking is dead." Tim Ogilvie, CEO of innovation strategy consultancy and co-author of a new book on design thinking, disagrees.
Action Plan for Rapid Innovation – Part 2
At Orange, the international mobile and fixed carrier issued from France Telecom, there is a strategy to diversify the services it offers to its users and has set up Orange Vallée as an external entity to drive innovation. Nicolas Bry tells us more about how the system works.
Asking the Important Questions: A Guide to Design Thinking And a Better Way to Serve Customers
Design thinking should be a way of life for senior managers. Melba Kurman spoke to Sara Beckman, design and innovation expert at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, about how to apply design thinking to the innovation process.
What is Lens Shifting and How Can it Help You Shape Your Innovation Strategy?
Measuring innovation is tough on most counts – unless you happen to be lucky enough to create new blockbuster products. One way to make strategy easier to frame and guide is to have a set of leading indicators telling you if your innovation efforts are working out. Deb Mills-Scofield looks at how to set up the lead indicator process through 'Lens Shifting'.
Overcoming Opportunity Blindness and Path Dependence: How To Think Your Way to Multiple Futures
In the age of permanent uncertainty there is a resurgent interest in scenario planning. Executives that have witnessed high profile decline of strong companies know that past success is no guaranteed guide to the future. Kevin McDermott & Peter Kennedy argue that scenario planning can be lifted out of its conventional uses in strategy development and risk management and used instead to avoid “opportunity blindness”.
An Open Innovation Reference Framework: Reducing Innovation
Can we bring an open collaborative spirit to understanding, describing and prescribing innovation methods? Paul Hobcraft and Jeffrey Philips believe we can and that it will greatly simplify the innovation process.
Innovation for Real Growth
Despite the noise around new forms of innovation many companies are not getting the results that matter – new products and highly scaled markets. Rob Shelton and John Riggs of PRTM look at how to really power up growth.
Who is in Control of Your Innovation Process?
Who is in control of your innovation process? If it is not management, your process will go nowhere, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner. Sadly, many companies launch half-baked innovation initiatives and hand control over to ill-trained managers, consultants, customers and even the general public.
Chris Bangle on Innovation
Chris Bangle is one of the most influential designers of the post-war era. He took over as Chief Designer at BMW in the early 1990s and transformed both the brand and the look of cars in general, drawing admiration, and envy, from competitors like Ford. Now running his own consultancy, Bangle talks to IM about innovation from a design perspective.
Time to Front up On Green: How Innovation Managers Can Kick-Start Sustainable Innovation
Innovation management is a formative discipline and innovation managers have had their hands full with ideas management, design thinking, service innovation and many more new ideas. But sustainable innovation should be a key tool in any innovation manager's skill-set, argues Chris Sherwin, sustainability expert at Forum for the Future.
Why Business Model Innovation is Critically Important Today
One of the few ways left for companies to protect their margins is through business model differentiation. According to Kay Plantes, business models have become the new basis of competition, replacing product features and benefits as the playing field on which companies emerge as dominant or laggards.
Is it Time to Rewrite the Innovation Playbook: Ten New Requirements in the Age of Hyperinnovation
In the world of hyperinnovation innovation itself is changing. In place of a monolithic R&D based innovation culture we suddenly have a proliferation of innovation approaches and new pressures on enterprises to innovate. Haydn Shaughnessy and Nick Vitalari argue the innovation playbook needs to be rewritten, and relabelled.
The Purposeful Entrepreneur
What makes an entrepreneur's decision making different from an executive's and can the two ever meet? We asked investor and start-up champion Tony Fish to explore entrepreneur vs. executive innovator as he prepares to launch a novel new digital collaborative incubator in London.
Large Firms and the Growth of Start-up Culture: a Key Dependency in the Age of Innovation
Steven Klepper, the recipient of the 2011 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, has spent all of his professional career looking at how innovation and the fate of large firms are so closely intertwined. His conclusions on how large firms, start-ups and clusters interact should be required reading for innovation managers and strategists everywhere.
How to Engage SMEs in Innovation Networks- Lessons from the Dutch campaign FuturizedBusinesses
Current public innovation support often fails to activate a significant group of SMEs. As a result, the innovation infrastructure is not utilized to its true value and capacity by a key constituency – small and growing companies. Not-for-profit intermediary Syntens initiated a campaign “FuturizedBusinesses” with Regional Development Agencies and the Chambers of Commerce to tackle this. Here's what we learned.
The Wonderful and the Weird of Chinese Innovation
The pace and style of innovation in China is producing some weird, some wonderful and some odd new products. Yinglan Tan concludes the three part series on Chinnovation.
8 Reasons Why Chinnovation Will Persist
Continuing our series on Chinese innovation Yinglan Tan looks at 8 reasons why Chinese innovation will continue to be a major talking point in everyone’s career. If you thought today’s turbulence would soon be over, think again.
The Critical Importance of Competitive Scenario Creation
Does your company currently consider alternative future states which anticipate your competitors' likely new product introductions? Or, new competitors, not yet known in the market? If not, it should.