Innovation Decimation: Refined Sugar and the iPhone
I see no value in waiting until New Year’s Day to resolve to improve myself. “Now is as good as time as any,” makes more sense to me. Last month I resolved to make two changes which, if I succeed in maintaining the alterations, promise to benefit me. In this article, I share my view on these changes, the immediate effect they have had on me, and their relation to the practice of collaborative innovation.
5 Advantages to Crowdsourced Innovation Management
At the beginning of the twentieth century, research and development was a highly guarded and elite practice. Imagine laboratories peopled by white-coated scientists who had passwords to protect the doors to their office. This kind of research and innovation was highly successful for a long time – it gave us electrocardiography, DNA fingerprinting, and many Apple products.
Untapping Hidden Value: A New Partnership Model for Corporate Knowledge Management and Innovation Functions
In the current business environment, defined by some as the ‘Knowledge Age’, leadership interest is increasingly focused on Innovation and Knowledge Management development efforts. To date, these functions often operate along parallel, yet discrete, paths. As organizations seek new areas of growth, while further cutting costs there is an increasing need to build more effective partnerships in order to ensure ongoing success and drive additional business value.
The Creative Destruction of Your Job
The rise of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdtransporting, crowdletting, etc., has transformed our economy. It has also ushered in the era of the shared economy. Previously marginalized people can now contribute, no matter how small, to all walks of life. It seems to be a fantastic opportunity for the world to access the untapped skill of the crowd. But what about the people whose jobs this makes redundant? Whither the expert?
Four Tools to Support Creativity and Innovation
There are four different types of innovation tools that we’ll describe here, including the design of the work place itself, practices that encourage and even enable effective collaboration, open innovation approach to connect inside innovation teams with outside partners and experts, and online tools that constitute the virtual work place. Separately and especially together, these can make a tremendous enhancement in the performance and the satisfaction of individuals, teams, and your entire organization.
4 Tricks to Building a Successful Open Innovation Program
One of the most critical professional challenges that employees face today is being able to successfully manage positive change within their organization. Innovation has become a watch word, with so many divisions not being able to find enough valuable ideas and then successfully manage those ideas into a commercial offering that sometimes companies even respond to customer tickets and bugs and simply label those results as “innovation.”
Speed of Innovation – How to Master Rapid Prototyping
In the disciplined and structured process of innovation we search for unmet needs and unfulfilled desires, and when we think we find them we have to construct a sort of a mental map that defines why our proposed solution will be better than whatever currently exists. We may use the business model map to show how we’re using this innovation to move up and to the right, or we may use the customer value ladder to show how this innovation provides differentiated value. And once we’re convinced that our idea is a really good one, the next step is often prototyping.
Embrace or Ignore Innovation Stakeholders: A Perspective on Corporate Antibodies
The accepted approach for Corporate Innovation leaders is to secure buy-in from all stakeholders, in order to secure success. This article (first in a series) argues against this approach, aiming for a more tempered effort, that seeks enough buy-in to push forward.
Building an Effective Corporate Incubator / Accelerator: A New Approach
With so much focus on establishing corporate innovation incubators and accelerators, more attention needs to be paid to maintaining effective employee connections back into the business units that will support the newly formed ideas.
Overcoming the Challenges to Successful Open Innovation
Before any organization can reap the economic benefits of open innovation, it must overcome a number of legal, operational and cultural challenges. In this article Peter von Dyck addresses the top three obstacles to open innovation: managing intellectual property issues and other legal risks, processing ideas quickly and establishing an efficient internal structure.
An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself
Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers. Using external resources can often avoid pitfalls and align the portal success rate to corporate expectations, objectives and ambitions. Here six questions are asked that can help you take the decision whether to launch a managed portal internally or externally.
Outside / Inside Innovation: Combining Open Innovation with Employee Networks to Drive Success
As business leaders seek additional impact from Innovation Programs, new ways to leverage and scale existing resources are being explored. One approach is to link externally sourced ideas with networks of innovation-minded employees, to generate additional business impact.
Starting an Innovation Program? A Strategic Approach to Create Success
Many innovation leaders tend to be tactically driven, but their corporate leadership is looking for more strategic planning and analysis. This tension often contributes to high turnover in innovation management roles, based on a misalignment around leadership’s expectations. In this article Anthony Ferrier suggests perspectives and actions that should be considered part of your innovation strategy plan.
Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity
Charles Darwin said it quite well: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Innovation, collaboration, and improvisation are indeed essential forces shaping all of business and all of modern life, and they’ve become vitally important for the individual, the organization, and indeed for all of society.
10 Commandments of Effective Crowdsourcing
For the companies which have embraced the crowdsourcing mindset in their business processes, the motive is more than just outsourcing. It's about better collaboration, better innovation outcomes and ultimately superior value. But like many other new business models, some fail and some succeed in accomplishing this mission.
Intrapreneurs, Catalysts, Champions, etc: The Changing Needs Within Innovation Development
In part three of this series Anthony Ferrier considers why organizations are seeking ways to identify, engage and drive their employees towards innovative activities, with titles such as Intrapreneaurs, Innovation Catalysts, Innovation Champions, etc.
Open Innovation: Lego and Bagels
Arguably, the principle of Open Innovation was utilised for the first time by Professor James Murray in 19th Century Oxford, England. In the time that has passed since then, this concept has become infinitely easier to implement thanks to the development of Innovation Management technology, however some companies are yet to wake up to its potential.
Learning From Innovation Hubs: Fluidity, Serendipity, and Community Combined
Innovation hubs are popping up from Addis to Amsterdam and Boston to Bangalore. Fuelled by ideals of openness, community and collaboration, hubs aim to be the next orgware for innovation—beyond business incubators and R&D labs. Managers, policymakers and investors have taken note, but are grappling with how to engage. What makes hubs so appealing and can they teach innovation managers anything new?
Activities To Support Your Employee Intrapreneurs
In part two of this series looking at ways organizations can support intrapreneaurs, Anthony Ferrier suggests a list of strategies and approaches to improve the effectiveness of intrapreneurs in your organisation.
Fueling Your Employees’ Entrepreneurial Spirit: A New Approach to Intrapreneurs and the Value They Create
Cast your mind back, to pre-2008 times, when bright and bushy tailed graduates would come out of business school looking for roles in the relevant employers of choice. Generally those organizations were large businesses, providing incentives such as expensive dinners, a career advancement path and generous financial packages.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong With Open Innovation?
Everyone understands the value and promise of open innovation in the business world – from brand awareness and customer engagement through to the search for fresh answers. But, truth be told, most programmes are failing to deliver results because their dynamics are too complex and the processes used are proving inefficient. A lack of relevance is also strongly affecting returns.
Scale and Impact: Supercharging The Success of Your Innovation Efforts
How do innovation leaders access additional resources to enhance the scale and impact of their efforts across complex, global organizations?
Open Innovation Intermediaries: Are they valuable?
The success of Open Innovation hinges on many organizational aspects as we have discussed extensively on the MOOI forum in the past months and will continue to do so until the end of this year. From the beginning of next year, we will start co-creating our e-book on the Management and Organization of Open Innovation in a joint effort with the MOOI forum members.
Should I Talk About My Co-creation Partners?
Research and practice have investigated firms’ benefits of co-creation with external stakeholders, such as more creative ideas, reduced development costs, and improved product quality. However, little is known about how consumers perceive products and their firms that communicate about such co-creation activities. Using two experimental studies, we investigated how consumers’ knowledge about the involvement of different types of stakeholders during the innovation process changes the adoption of new products.