The Competition is Not Who You Think It Is
It has become extremely difficult to foresee competition. But this isn’t cause for alarm. It’s now far more important to forge ahead with innovation, allowing a product or service to evolve in new ways, than trying to crush or outsmart perceived competition.
Get Engaged in Next Generation Innovation – What do I need to get started?
How do you prepare to overcome the implementation barriers in an open innovation environment? What types of issues need to be considered? How can you prevent fear of violated IPR issues becoming show-stoppers in your open innovation process? And how can common pitfalls be avoided? These are some of the challenges covered in this IM Channel One webinar.
A Graphene Revolution?
The discovery of graphene has not only won two scientists the Nobel Prize, but its extraordinary properties have triggered a boom in research, investment and superlatives. While the list of potential applications continues to rise, and the race to invest and research speeds up, a major challenge remains making graphene cheaply and easily.
Use Front and Back End of Innovation Skills
With a front-end that's fuzzy and a back end that isn't very effective, no wonder creating new products and services isn't easy. Gijs van Wulfen explains why connecting the two can enhance inspiration and smooth the innovation implementation process.
Social Product Innovation Challenges: How to Develop Your Strategy
A couple weeks ago I laid out the framework for the most common challenges companies face as they get started with their social product innovation initiatives. The most common challenges fall into five main buckets – strategy, people and culture, business processes, technology and sustainability. So let’s take a deeper look at developing a social product innovation strategy, the typical challenges and some ideas for overcoming them.
Pulp Innovation XXXIII: The One-Woman Innovation Program
Marlow reviews the prep work with a long time client who's energy and enthusiasm inspires her entire company. His client decides to leave the scope rather broad in order to find disruptive opportunities that they were not seeing because of the ‘business as usual’ mindset.
Insource Innovation to Generate Better Ideas & Fuel Product Pipelines
Is innovation a numbers game? We’ve all heard the statistics around the number of ideas it takes to eventually lead to a single successful product. But if we look at why it takes 3000 to 6000 or more ideas to find a single winning concept, the answer becomes fairly obvious: not every idea is a good idea. Mark Atkins explores how we can create better ideas, not more ideas.
Water, the Oil of the 21st Century – Pressure is Rising
As the world welcomes its 7 billionth inhabitant the pressures on water supplies continue to rise, often ignored and underestimated. The pressures on water supply present huge challenges, but also opportunities to improve capture, conservation and management.
How Appreciative Inquiry Can Help you to be More Creative: Interview with William E. Smith, Ph.D.
Appreciative inquiry gives us the power to transcend current models, thinking, judgements and structures, so we can realize more of our creative potential, explains William E. Smith Ph.D, President of ODII. Bill is an innovative thinker and practitioner in the field of leadership, organization and social development. He's developed new, creative approaches to organization for multinational corporations, governments, and villages all over the world.
A valuable new open innovation primer for small companies from Stefan Lindegaard
How can small companies participate effectively in open innovation? That's the central focus of Stefan Lindegaard's new book, Making Open Innovation Work.
Benchmarking E-mail Usage to Assess Collaborative Innovation
The practice of collaborative innovation opens the door to meaningfully transforming the ways in which people engage with one another as they pursue the critical questions facing the organization. Understanding the extent to which people continue to use incumbent means of collaboration can help you to understand the extent to which they have embraced the practice. In this article Doug Collins suggests having a look at our old friend, e-mail.
How to use Systems Thinking to Unearth Innovation Opportunities
It used to be that "systems thinking" was a specialty reserved for a select few intellectuals. Now that it's clear every element of our work is part of a larger system that visibly and invisibly shapes our individual and organizational opportunities and risks, it's time for all us, and especially those looking towards innovation, to become systems thinkers. Why? Understanding system dynamics provides insights into where innovation will have a high payback, explains Kay Plantes.
Business Processes Innovation
This article provides a reflexion on how employees innovative mindset could benefit corporation business processes, hence, their results
Pulp Innovation XXXII: Drafting a Skunkworks Proposal
Marlow's courageous yet nervous ally at Accipiter is almost ready to deliver her innovation proposal to the board. Marlow helps to outline the tangible and intangible benefits they could deliver with the skunkworks.
Next Generation Innovation – What does it Mean to Me as a Practitioner?
In this IM Channel One webinar David Burns talks about some of the challenges connected with how to better leverage Open Innovation in your organization. For example how processes and structures can be put in place to manage, rank, decide on, track and archive hundreds or thousands of ideas and challenges.
How to Avoid the Innovation Death Spiral
Consider this all too familiar scenario: Company X’s new products developed and launched with great expectations, yield disappointing results. Yet, these products continue to languish in the market, draining management attention, advertising budgets, manufacturing capacity, warehouse space and back office systems. Wouter Koetzier explores how to avoid the innovation death spiral.
Culture Is Key – Increased R&D Budget Won’t Help
The annual Global Innovation 1000 Study from Booz & Company shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.
How Strategic Planning Smothers Innovation: One Organization’s Story
The story of a once-innovative financial services firm illustrates the perils of substituting 'messy' innovation with a logical, orderly strategic planning process.
3 Advantages of Challenge-Driven Innovation
In his new book, innovation expert Stephen Shapiro recommends taking a challenge-driven approach to innovation, rather than open-ended idea collection, which tends to be wasteful of human resources and rarely delivers problem-solving ideas.
The Future of Innovation Management: 5 Key Steps for Future Success
Looking back is a natural as we look to learn lessons from past activity. But perhaps more interesting is to look forwards. In this article Rick Eagar draws on the results from recent research that surveyed the opinions of global Chief Technology Officers and Chief Information Officers and identifies key changes in five distinct but interrelated innovation management concepts as being important for the years ahead.
Pulp Innovation XXXI: The Creative Environment
Marlow describes the space they have created at the firm to take clients out of their sterile offices and into a room conducive to cross-fertilization, brainstorming and prototyping. Now if only Marlow could get the Accipiter team out on a field trip...
Biomimicry: How Business Solves Problems by Looking to Nature
Sometimes, talking about new ways of approaching business benefits from looking at some of the world's oldest ways of doing business. Biomimicry is a practical methodology to solve problems by looking to nature. Learn more from some examples of biomimicry on social media and co-creation.
How to Solve 7 Challenges in Employee Driven Innovation
The collective wisdom of your co-workers is a huge asset in the fuzzy front end. But which challenges do you need to address and solve in order to create a structured and effective employee driven innovation process? Read more about a method using idea markets as a powerful incentive. And it has already proven its worth in a number of large Scandinavian companies.
Not so Rational Decisions
Recent research into power, status, stress and aspirational gadgets reveals the extent to which decisions are anything but rational. Investment decisions and governance could be subject to new forms of scrutiny.