Pulp Innovation Chapter LXII: Forming the Central Innovation Team
Susan and Marlow are busy recruiting people who will take a proactive stance and push against the status quo. Slowly the outlines of the central innovation team start to take shape.
Creative Problem Solving Technique: Become the Problem
When we are trying to generate ideas in order to solve a problem, whether through anticonventional thinking, brainstorming or another method, we typically distance ourself slightly from the problem. We look for ideas on how to improve our company’s product, how to deliver better customer service, how to cut costs or alternative business models. In all of these cases, we separate ourselves from the problem and, by so doing, we potentially limit our understanding of the problem. Why not take a different approach and become the problem?
Innovation’s Vital Role in Germany
Germany is a forward-thinking nation with the largest GDP in Europe. Germany is also one out of only four innovation leaders in the top performance group of all EU27 Member States. Their private and public sector R&D funding is on the rise in the midst of a global economic crisis and they enjoy growing economic ties with China. So what is Germany doing right?
New Literacies Needed?
Increasingly, many Western societies face a ‘double whammy’: simultaneous high levels of youth unemployment and skills shortages. But it is not just formal and traditional skills that are needed; ‘new literacies’ from the digital to real world, verbal to visual, scientific and financial are being highlighted as critical to our futures. New literacies could be seen as little more than rebranding of old ideas, but in doing so it may focus attention and garner momentum for change and new solutions for our new economies.
Governance in the Context of the Innovation Blueprint
What does governing the practice of collaborative innovation mean? When we govern do we compromise the spirit of openness and experimentation that enlivens the practice? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins applies the blueprint for collaborative innovation to explore these critical questions. His view? Governance is guidance: helping people work to their potential.
Part 8: A Balanced View: Conclusions and Key Learnings
Whenever customers are not getting what they need, business opportunities are opened. When properly implemented, mass customization has the potential to provide a long lasting competitive advantage through better, more adapted products and services that can be sold at premium prices. This final article in the Customization500 series sums up the conclusions and key learnings.
IBM CEO Study: Openness by Social Media Is Key Enabler to Organizational Success
According to the IBM CEO study conducted amongst 1,700 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 sectors, Open CEOs' identify openness enabled and supported by social media and technologies, as a major influence on their organization and its success. These organizations perform better because they are utilizing the collective intelligence, are more agile, able to act quickly to gain higher profitability and growth.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXI: The Ultimate Team Building Strategy
Susan and Marlow are off to do what could be the most trying task of all in their innovation effort – finding the right people who are willing to work on an innovation project. How will they get the necessary connections, ideas and passion in their team? Marlow has a plan.
5 Key Success Principles – the Cure for Innovation Envy
Experience and research tell us five key success principles are seen across the cultures of ‘serial innovators.’ The good news: These characteristics can be adapted for any company, regardless of industry.
Generating Creative Ideas with Hieroglyphics
Using hieroglyphics for ideation is an unusual but potentially viable lateral thinking technique from Tom Wujec's excellent book, Five Star Mind.
Personal Delivery on the Rise
Collaborative consumption and peer to peer (P2P)systems are taking a new turn: collaborative delivery. P2P delivery sites put people in need of different items locally or in faraway places in touch with people who are willing to bring them. They provide access to much needed items to the recipient; new experiences and an opportunity to do a good deed to the deliverer; and make better use of journey related resources and carbon emissions.
Part 7: Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing Mass Customization
While compiling data for the Customization500 study over a period of 12 months, the researchers noticed that roughly 20% of the companies went out of business during this time. In part 7 of this series, we take a closer look at the reasons why both startups and established companies fail at implementing mass customization and in what areas managers can expect the strongest resistance.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LX: Crunch Time
Marlow combines his plans and experience with Susan's knowledge of the organization to create a rough outline of the innovation game plan. Can they refine the details to make sure their plan aligns with the goals and budget they’d been given?
How to Pick the Right Idea?
Imagine you have just finished a successful brainstorming session and you're sitting in front of a long list of great ideas. Now what? Gijs van Wulfen shares five important learnings on how to pick the right idea.
7 Key Steps to Successful Open Innovation in China
More and more Multinational Companies (MNCs) are turning to China for open innovation for several important reasons. Find out what those reasons are and learn more about best practices to succeed at open innovation in the unique Chinese market. This article delves deeper into how harvest the power of innovation from one of the world’s most populous and fastest-growing countries
Accurate Problem Definition is Critical to Effective Problem Solving
In business and in life, clear and accurate problem definition is an essential prerequisite for effective problem solving. This may sound obvious, or even trite, but this simple truth can be overlooked by those with pressing needs and a bias for action.
Financial Management for Innovation
Seldom spoken about, the capacity to capture, allocate, control and utilize financial resources is fundamental to innovation. Without strong financial management, innovation might come to a dead stop, might never happen or might just cost much more than it should. In this blog Caspar van Rijnbach asks the questions to take into consideration when managing finances for your innovation portfolio.
A Coming Food Waste Revolution?
Food waste is a major and growing problem; it is also moving rapidly up policy, corporate and consumer agendas. Reducing food waste is a win: win solution several times over: saving the planet, people, resources and money. It may need something of a food waste revolution but the current combination of pressures, new technologies and new solutions may be enough to achieve it.
Finding the Social in Social Business
People speak of creating the social business. What does that phrase mean? Do we sip lattes and play foosball in the break room? How does this magical entity differ from its anti-social brethren? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the intent and possibilities that define the social business.
Part 6: Choice Navigation in Reality: A closer look into the Customization500
The customer's experience and a feeling of achievement during the co-design process is vital to the success of a custom product. In part 3 of the Mass Customization Series, Dominik Walcher & Frank Piller explain why managers should look beyond the sheer technology and back office integration of configuration toolkits and also focus on delivering a great configuration experience.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LIX: Building the Plane While it’s Flying
Marlow and Susan start to build the momentum around the innovation project by tackling several important issues simultaneously. They desperately need to demonstrate short-term, actionable results in order to lift off.
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?
Open Innovation in SMEs
Difficult market conditions force SMEs to adapt or reinvent their businesses through new technologies or unique value propositions, but they often lack resources and technical capabilities and must thus collaborate with others to compete. Those that succeed in this transition often employ open innovation. A study by Dr Wim Vanhaverbeke, in collaboration with Ine Vermeersch and Stijn De Zutter found that open innovation can create new opportunities for all types of SME – from start-ups in high-tech markets to players in traditional markets – because they can change business models without having the required technologies in-house.
Rewarding Creativity: 3 Lessons on When it Works
It is well known that intrinsic motivation–the kind that comes from working with a task because it's interesting, involving and challenging–has the strongest relationship with individual creativity. Extrinsic motivation–especially based on monetary rewards–has a detrimental effect on creativity. But is this really true? In this article, we'll explore how to reward creativity and realize that everything may not be as it seems.