Innovation Incubators and Accelerators: What Happens When They Go Wrong?
I recently wrote an article that outlined a new approach to developing and supporting successful innovation incubators and accelerators within corporate organizations. The article appeared to have touched a nerve as I had a number of people reach out to me to offer their experiences with incubators/accelerators. While I received a range of opinions, I was actually most interested in the stories of failure.
Rethinking The Way We Generate Insights
Identifying new sources of growth has become increasingly more complex given the myriad of alternatives that new business models, strategic partnerships, advanced technologies, and other disruptive mechanisms offer us. Taking a systematic approach to finding these opportunities means veering from our usual mode of operations to a much more speculative mindset where the learning journey is as important as the destination itself.
The Boom – Not Doom – from Market Failure
What do non-consumption, organizational friction and market failure have in common? These days, everyone is “innovating” to find the next big thing. But where do you start? One way is to try and think of innovation as having mass, and therefore it cannot be created from truly nothing. Innovation must start somewhere, and it must start with something that already exists.
Systematizing Breakthrough Innovation: Study Results
Most companies recognize the need for breakthrough innovation – it can change the fundamental bases of competition, “rewrite the rules” of an industry and transform the prospects of the successful innovator. There is no one-size-fits-all model for how best to respond to this challenge. Arthur D. Little surveyed over 80 large organizations to explore how to deliver a consistent pipeline of radically new products, performance features, business models and market space.
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.”
The Rise of the Chief Innovation Officer
Questionable or confusing job titles have long provided fleeting office lunch-break entertainment. A quick search online brings up innumerable lists, featuring classics such as: Senior Information Adviser (otherwise known as a librarian), Wet Leisure Assistant (lifeguard) and Ideation Director (advertising). In this article Harvey Wade, Director, Innovation Strategy at Mindjet, discusses why a job title formerly found at wannabe creative companies is now playing an increasingly recognised and integral role in business.
Do You Really Want Disruptive Innovation?
What company wouldn’t want to come out with the next iPhone, online bookstore or Swiffer mop? In the right circumstances disruptive innovation can be a valid path to drive the long-term survival and growth of a mature organization. But Anthony Ferrier argues that most companies are not in that environment. They talk (a lot) about pursuing disruptive innovation, but the reality is that they don’t really want, or are able, to support it.
How to Avoid Robot-Zombie Innovation
In order to create Breakthrough Innovations, you need to abandon the corporate robot-zombie talk, says Andrew Benson. By cultivating an open and free form innovation culture organizations can avoid the idea logjams created by formal innovation processes.
Germany’s Innovation Jam
Is Germany loosing the connection to today’s speed of change? In his new book “Germany’s Innovation Jam – How we create a new generation of founders,” Author Jürgen Stäudtner looks at German innovation pitfalls and corresponding resolutions.
Innovation Stakeholder Management: Gain Success From My Failure
In the second article on innovation stakeholder management, Anthony Ferrier focuses on two examples where he tried to generate broad support for innovation efforts with varying degrees of success. The lessons learned from these experiences provide insights for practitioners to successfully navigate stakeholder relations.
Strong Businesses Need Strong Recognition Programs
It is the duty of management to ensure that the human capital they are responsible for are working productively. Appropriate recognition of excellent work by employees is a huge part of having a happy and productive workforce with less turnover. If employees are starting to work less efficiently, it may be time to reinvent management practices to rejuvenate your company culture.
The Battle Between Innovation and Managers
Innovation initiatives have a habit of causing excitement and expectation; the organisation is trying something different and wanting to do new things. Senior management are anticipating the brand new shiny ideas, and front-line employees can’t wait to be rid of their daily frustrations. So what could go wrong? However, in all this excitement, there’s a group that is usually neglected in the engagement strategy – the middle managers. Often it’s assumed that these managers will support all the company initiatives. It’s their role to toe the line and make sure others do. They’ll buy in surely? Actually, they don’t.
Innovation: Force Fields for Change
This article relates selected multidirectional patterns of change—“force fields”—in the business environment to innovation strategy within the context of Zen philosophical principles. Three force fields are selected for brief evaluation: 1) domestic vs. global markets, 2) economic growth vs. environmental quality, and 3) entrepreneurs vs. customer base. Given the omnipresence of force fields in the 21st century, businesses should maintain flexible structures for innovating both incrementally and radically. They also need to engage in collaboration at all institutional levels. Collaboration can facilitate the Zen objective of integrating conflicting ideas, a key feature of innovation over the long run.
Emergence: The Next Efficient Evolution of Crowd-Sourced Innovation
Surfing the crowd has hit the mainstream…Young, agile firms have always been known for their disruptive ideas. Increasingly, enterprises are keen to foster a similar innovation culture so that great concepts can surface even in a company with thousands of employees. The challenge comes when there are many layers of management and frontline workers are struggling to navigate the corporate hierarchy so their ideas are heard by the leadership team. In a bid to transform its business, Microsoft recently announced it would cut thousands of middle management jobs to ease the flow of information and decision making, ‘no longer respecting tradition but only innovation’.
7 Ways For You To Be the Best Leader In Your Entrepreneurship
Founders of new companies have a lot on their plate. With efforts and energies spread in so many different directions, it can be easy to lose sight of a very important role – being a good leader for your team. In this article, entrepreneur Sameer Bhatia lists a few ways you can set a good example and set your company up for success.
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.
7 Things to Do Before Starting Any Project
Everyone plans tasks in different ways, but the largest, most complicated projects have tried-and-tested methodologies that help break processes down and ensure that stakeholders and different departments are clear about which tasks need to be completed by whom and by what time. This article breaks project planning down into seven key tasks that have to be completed before work begins to give the project the best possible chance of coming in on time and on budget.
How a Safe Workplace Can Lead to More Innovation
Maintaining a safe workplace is obviously very important if you want to avoid costly accidents and injuries on the job, but it has several other benefits as well. In this article, Tom Reddon highlights a few reasons why keeping a safe workplace makes good business sense.
Transforming How We Work
The essence of agility is the ability to respond to new and different conditions. You cannot continue repeating the same old operating formula long beyond its utility or you will be left behind. Are you prepared to adapt to the profuse variety of new circumstances with new tactics and strategies? The principles of Agile that we examine in the next three chapter excerpts of Agile Innovation will help you understand what you need to do.
Driving Innovation in Middle-Market Companies
For those of you who read my articles on a regular basis, you will know that I tend to focus on driving innovative activities and cultures within large, corporate organizations. Today however, I would like to focus on the value of innovation to growing, mid-market companies. For the purposes of this article I will consider mid-market companies as anywhere from 300 – 3,000 employees. This is just an arbitrary number, but it provides context for our discussion.
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.
7-Tips To Consider Around Your Innovation Training Efforts
As more companies examine employee-focused innovation training efforts, this article offers some crucial tips to ensure the long-term success associated with this important task.
Three Common Ways Organizations Trip When It Comes to Innovation
Innovation appears prominently as part of almost any company’s strategy. Why then is it so hard to make it repeatable, scalable and lasting success? Scholars name key elements that bring innovation in sync, such as leadership, strategy and governance. Often, though, it’s not what organizations aren’t doing that causes a problem, but what they are doing—they’re tripping themselves up.
Market Intelligence Oriented Culture: a Key Driver for Innovation
It is always a great achievement when we can affirm that something has been done according to one strategic plan, goal or thought. Sound strategic planning capabilities depend on industry/sector specific understanding and full perception of the external competitive environment. In the sixth and last of a series of articles focused on Innovation Culture, the focus is on a process called Market Intelligence (MI). This process can be affirmed as a cyclic, continuous organizational process that deals with dispersed data, information and knowledge in a competitive sector, to produce knowledge to be applied by companies in their strategic marketing planning.