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.
Facilitadores de Inovação
Dizem que variedade é "o tempero da vida" – mas no trabalho é o tempero, os ingredientes e uma boa parte de equipamento de cozinha também. No esforço para construir programas de inovação corporativos abrangentes e sustentáveis, entretanto, vemos muitas empresas ignorando a necessidade de diversidade – em alcance e composição de seus programas. Foi-se o tempo em que o crescimento de uma empresa pode ser sustentado com a inovação de alguns indivíduos solitários em um laboratório ou sala de conferência. Inovação nos dias de hoje precisa ser uma mentalidade singular em toda a empresa – com executivos não só pedindo, mas exigindo a colaboração de toda a organização enquanto buscam solucionar os problemas estratégicos e táticos que se interpõem no caminho do progresso.
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.
New Report: Leaders Driving Innovation in the Enterprise
Imagine if you could listen to the daily conversations of world-class innovation program leaders. How would you use that information to deepen your thinking about innovation and what it takes to really implement it, organization-wide?
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.
Forward Focus Podcast with Lars Percy Andersson
Senior Editor and Special Communication Projects Lead at IIR USA, Marc Dresner interviewed Lars Percy Andersson, Founder and CEO at InnovationManagement.se in order to discuss how companies approach the process of managing innovation. In this brief podcast they discuss strategies such as corporate acquisition and how to approach culture change in order to benefit innovation.
Mind Mapping for Business… Are you Serious?
Time and time again I get asked and challenged on an age-old issue of whether or not mind mapping is, at worst, just another fad, a ”nice to have” or, at best, a real value-adding benefit that has a serious place within a business or organisation.
Hyperselect – Identifying Top Ideas and Projects with Higher Precision
Clear separation of top ideas from mediocre and weak ideas is essential, before financial and other resources are allocated. The Hyperselect method provides a new, sound and improved way to fulfill this task. Moreover it reveals, that hyperbolas might be “the better matrix” in quite a lot of methods for prioritization and beyond.
4 Ways To Encourage Innovation In Your Startup Business
As the market becomes saturated, it becomes difficult for many businesses, especially startup enterprises, to stay on top of their competitions. Technology has paved a way for firms to revolutionize their marketing and management strategies. Another tried and tested way to infiltrate their specific markets successfully is to inspire innovation within their offices, from employees to their brand.
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.
Innovation Enablers
They say variety is “the spice of life” – but in our working lives, it’s the spice, ingredients and a good portion of the kitchen equipment too. In striving to build comprehensive and sustainable enterprise innovation programs however, too often I see companies then ignoring the need for diversity – both in the reach and composition of their programmes. We are long past the days where a company’s growth can be sustained with innovation from a few solitary individuals in a lab or conference room. Innovation nowadays needs to be a singular mindset across the entire company – with executives not just asking, but instead requiring collaborative input from across the organisation as they look to solve the strategic and tactical problems that stand in the way of progress.
Superando os Desafios para o Sucesso em Inovação Aberta
Antes de qualquer organização poder colher os benefícios econômicos da inovação aberta (“open innovation”), ela deve superar uma série de desafios legais, operacionais e culturais. Neste artigo, Peter von Dyck aborda os três principais obstáculos para a inovação aberta: gerenciar aspectos de propriedade intelectual e outros riscos legais, processar ideias rapidamente e estabelecer uma estrutura interna eficiente.
Be Ready for the Next Major Technology Shifts in Your Industry
Technological and industry shifts are important drivers of innovation. Look no further than the advent of the mobile broadband Internet and the shift to the era of intelligent, connected devices. Even though shifts are difficult to anticipate, they often lead to fundamental business changes. Staying up to date with these changes is vital.
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.
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.
Innovation is not always nice to have. Unless you play-to-win!
Because of today’s business hype for innovation we encounter situations where there can be too much of a good thing going on and successful companies tend to be aware of this potential pitfall. As much as a complete lack of innovation will lead to failure in an organization, left unmanaged, too many innovative ideas can cloud the judgement on which ideas are truly great. Innovation management therefore is crucial in the success of any organisation.
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.
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.
The Eight Cs of Transformational Change
Agile Innovation is an execution-based model, not a control-based model. This means that the focus is on what you do (execution) rather than on what you are instructed to do. Hence, this approach requires inner motivation, and it’s not going to thrive in environments characterized by extrinsic, hierarchical, or fear-based motivational schemes. In this final excerpt from Agile Innovation, Langdon Morris discusses approaches necessary to transform organizations to achieve innovation actions and outcomes.
Translating Unseen Needs into Innovations
The world is changing, yet people constantly assume, incorrectly, that tomorrow will be like yesterday. When business leaders make this mistake, the outcomes are generally bad because opportunities are lost. Competitive advantage is gained with the ability to transform insights into useful innovations by seeing the unseen. In this chapter excerpt of Agile Innovation, Langdon Morris explains how ethnography drives better innovation at a top-five U.S. financial services company.
Taxis vs. Uber: Un Perfecto Ejemplo de Resistencia al Cambio
En ciudades de todo el mundo una guerra fea se está luchando por compañías de taxi "tradicionales" en contra de una nueva forma de competencia de Uber y otros servicios de intercambio de transporte. Este artículo señala tres cosas compañías de taxi tienen en común con las empresas del pasado.