How to Build Knowledge-Based Companies?
Knowledge management improves organizational processes through a variety of different practices, and enhances learning, which can increase both follower engagement and personal development. This article presents the two key steps of successful knowledge management that can be implemented by company executives.
The Key Steps Innovation Professionals Should Take in a COVID-19 Environment
Obviously COVID-19 is having an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, with the scope and scale of business disruption being immense and incredibly challenging. But disruption is what innovation people are generally excellent at responding to, so the question becomes - “how do you and your team support your organisations within this environment?”
Ideation in Times of Crisis
If you’re thinking about launching a crowdsourcing campaign to respond to some of these challenges brought about by COVID-19, now is a good time. We are all learning so much right now and so quickly. And everyone wants to help, so let them.
How to Build YOUR Best Innovation Process
How might we build a more efficient or effective innovation process?
The Four Essentials For Engaging the Crowd With Your Innovation Program
Each strategic consultation with an IdeaScale Innovation Strategist starts with you. What outcomes would you like to see in 6 months time?...in 1 year?
Innovating in a Hierarchical Environment
Announcing the IdeaScale Nation podcast, where you'll be able to hear stories from innovators in government, the enterprise and beyond.
About Digital and Innovation – and What’s in Between
Digital and innovation - two big words that one defines, but are not always clear and precise. Many organizations of different sizes understand today that it is necessary to play in the Digital and Innovation fields in order to remain relevant, but it is not always clear how and how much.
The Ultimate Corporate Innovation Playbook
Now, more than ever, the corporate innovation industry grows as quickly as the technology that drives it. Thus, corporate innovators must set up the right foundational framework to kickstart their efforts. This Ultimate Corporate Innovation Playbook provides that framework by examining:
A New Value of Business Relationships
Small companies developing new technologies strive to survive the process of technology development: they have scarce resources to engage in business relationships. Is there any value on which they are missing out?
How Technology Can Augment Human Collaboration
Innovation requires collaboration, but collaboration is stuck in a rut. Data science can help us climb out. It can increase the scale, the intentionality, and the nuance of how we collaborate. With the right data and algorithms, we can set our teams up to do something innovative.
Urban innovation labs, hubs, coworking spaces… Which one to choose to boost your innovation?
Innovation is the Holy Grail of business success that can supercharge any kind of organisations from corporates to start-ups and shift them towards growth. Nevertheless, many organisations on the creative edge are struggling how to make innovation happen due to the rise of new work processes, changing demographics and new technologies.
Don’t “Fiddle” with the Crowd – Ask it Better Questions Instead
As the examples of successful use of crowdsourcing to address complex technical, business and social issues grow in numbers, so do the instances of failed crowdsourcing campaigns. To make crowdsourcing a widely recognized idea-generating and problem-solving tool, it’s imperative to understand the reasons of why this tool can fail or underperform.
Sink or Swim: Nouveau Economical Survival Strategies
Special understanding is critically needed on how new cyclones of artificial intelligence-laced, blockchain technology-driven digital platforms with capabilities like LinkedIn and baby-Alibaba type models will dance on global trade. Alibaba just broke some records: USD 1 billion sales in 3 minutes, and the other day some 24 billion dollars in 24 hours. This is dancing with global trades and prosperity on world stage. What are these deployment programs and who is stopping such mobilization in other nations?
How Open Innovation Can Be Used in the Financial Sector
In a recent article, The Financial Brand discussed the biggest threats to the financial and banking industry. They included a long list of everything from profitability to making good hiring decisions. However, we thought that there were a few problems that could be particularly fruitful when applied to open innovation systems.
Implementation is Your New Competitive Advantage
When it comes to implementation there are three things that companies ought to be thinking about in order to maintain a competitive advantage: process, feedback, and the importance of having multiple stakeholders from the beginning. Learn more in this Open Innovation Guide from IdeaScale.
Organizational Revolutions through Idea Hacking
Businesses face the dilemma dividing resources between protecting the current value chain and developing new value propositions that in time replace the old ones. Not every organization has the luxury to have its own dedicated innovation unit and still then the ideas might not always be too innovative. Hackathons are an affordable and energizing way to generate innovative ideas that can revolutionize your organization.
Managing Fundraising Innovation: the Dangers of the ‘Echo-Chamber’
This case study explores the results of an innovation research process undertaken by Oxfam, which compared internal feedback vs. general public feedback to identical sets of ideas. In comparing responses between these two audiences, Oxfam discovered an immediate and obvious divide between their staff’s opinions about which fundraising ideas would perform the best, versus what the general public preferred - an important lesson about avoiding the bubble of the echo chamber.
Trends in Innovation Leaders: Greater Risk and Big Bets
The latest Innovation Leaders research shows that there is an increasing number of high-growth companies that are prepared to take greater risk and make big bets. Rather than focus just on incremental growth, they are being bolder and are seeking to develop more radical innovation opportunities. Despite requiring significant investment and offering no guarantee of success this approach has been transformational for some. Where and why is this happening and what has changed that has made this approach more common?
The Engineering Behind Modern Superstructures
Human talent, drive and innovation can achieve incredible feats - and what more tangible example than modern superstructures? Let’s take a look at some of the drivers behind building bigger and better buildings worldwide, from improved materials, to cross-sector collaboration and beyond.
A Profile of Open Innovation Managers in Multinational Companies
Open innovation is widely used in large companies and we know increasingly more about how to manage this process. In contrast, we know virtually nothing about the managers and practitioners who are driving open innovation in large companies. Who are the managers operating in open innovation teams or units? What is their profile? How long do they stay in an open innovation job, and what is their tenure in the company? This report tries to answer these questions based on an investigation of open innovation managers on LinkedIn.
6 Pitfalls to Avoid in Innovation Development
Before investing in your company’s innovation development, it’s important to develop a strategy for collecting and evaluating ideas. Having guidelines in place to thoroughly vet ideas, value diverse opinions, prioritize scalable and sustainable results, and other areas of innovation management can set you up for success over the long term.
10 Skills You Need to Nurture in Your Innovation Group
Organizational innovation requires discipline. And like any other discipline, it requires monitoring and training to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of your capabilities. But what skills should you focus on building and how can you track your progress?
Collaborative Innovation – Hamburger Style
Often I read articles or books about top-down vs. bottom-up innovation and why one approach would be better than the other. After spending more than five years in the collaborative innovation space, I would advise going hamburger style!
Organizing within Networks of Collaborators
Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.
What Do Innovators Look Like?
Crowdsourced innovation is a tactic used more and more often by government organizations as well as enterprise corporations. This means that innovation teams need to add a new skill set to their resumé: communications.
Picking the Right Stakeholders for Open Innovation
What external stakeholder groups can you tap into to build value for your innovation initiatives? Are your relationships with these external stakeholder groups solid or do you need to do additional work to build good, mutually beneficial working relationships? Are there potential stakeholder groups that you have not yet tapped at all? If so, what is your plan for reaching out to organizations within these pools so that you can further expand your innovation ecosystem? Are your channels for communicating with your external stakeholders strong or do they need further work?
A Quick Guide to External Collaboration
Working with external partners to bring better products and services to market faster and/or develop better intellectual property has never been more popular in the world of business than what we see today.
The Four Essential Steps Towards Open Innovation Success
Although ‘open innovation’ is the talk of the town in R&D circles, leveraging external sources of innovation remains challenging for most companies. In 2013, researchers Dr. Joel West (Keck Graduate, Institute of Applied Life Sciences) and Dr. Marcel Bogers (University of Southern Denmark) suggested a four-phase model for inbound innovation projects. They emphasized that open innovation needs to go further than just obtaining external ideas. Integration, commercialization and the interaction between the firm and its collaborators are just as important. This post explores the four essential steps towards open innovation success.
Open Innovation: The Technology Scouting Uncertainty Principle
In any supplier/customer relationship, both sides (but quite often the supplier) desire clarity regarding the certainty of the relationship. When there is uncertainty, there is angst. Some of this is natural and necessary. However, Michael Fruhling believes that in open innovation it is needlessly excessive. How can it be reduced?
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?
A promising Approach to Finding Technology Solutions: Supplier Summits
Given the relatively small number of qualified solution providers for any given technical challenge, one fairly productive and successful problem solving approach undertaken by corporate technology seekers is to organize "supplier summits."
The Problem with Open Innovation Web Portals
Michael Fruhling doesn't like open innovation portals, in general. What's his problem with them?
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.
How to Make Open Innovation More Open
Here are some common-sense suggestions to improve everyone's experience when implementing open innovation initiatives.