ODI Practitioner Insights: An Interview with Marco de Polo from Roche Diabetes Care
It is quite rare for a company to open up and offer a true and detailed insight into their unique practices and experiences on their path to becoming more customer-centric. However, Marco de Polo from Roche Diabetes Care does exactly this in this interview with Martin Pattera.
Taking an Audience-Centric Approach During the Tech Adoption Lifecycle
Most marketing professionals understand that insight into the hearts and minds of your customers is central to successful product innovation. But which customers? Who is going to buy my product first? What happens after that? How can I eventually grow my customer base to one billion people?
The Future of Innovation: Learning to Lead with Heart
Design Thinking (DT), (also known as human-centered design) is an innovation process used to evolve products and services in business and social impact sectors. World-renowned companies like Apple, Google and GE use DT for business solutions, and top-tier colleges like Stanford, Harvard and MIT teach DT to students looking to solve the world’s biggest problems.
Social Product Innovation Challenges: Culture and People
The most common challenges companies face as they get started with the application of social models and technologies to innovation and product development fall into five main buckets – strategy, people and culture, business processes, technology and sustainability. In this post I will take a deeper look at the typical challenges around people and culture during a social product innovation initiative, and some ideas for overcoming them.
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.
Seven Managers Struggling with Innovation
Managers may come in all shapes and sizes, but almost all of them struggle with innovation or the lack there of in their organization. Gis van Wulfen introduces us to seven different managers who explain their views on innovation. Do you recognize any of them?
Lincoln’s Crowdsourcing: Allowing Consumers to be Designers
At the Pebble Beach, Calif. Concours D'Elegance Ford Motor’s Lincoln brand introduced a new tool “Virtual Voice of the Customer” to test design concepts on consumers. Lincoln asked attendees of the classic car show Aug. 20-21 to look at three design concepts based on vehicles from the '60s, '70s and '80s.
Social Media and Product Development – from Theory to Practice
Many of us have seen those “Did You Know?” videos on YouTube. With millions of views, these compelling videos give facts and stats on globalization in the information age, demonstrating the pervasiveness of social media as a medium for collaboration, knowledge sharing, open discussion and relationship building. This post briefly discusses three areas that show the most promise for generating real business value.
How to Create Compelling Brand Experiences
Crafting design strategies that result in truly compelling brand experiences, products and services demands a change from traditional methods. It requires a more creative and iterative design approach, which is optimized towards identifying real human needs and addressing them with meaningful experiences. Paul Noble-Campbell delves deeper into five critical keys to uncovering those true success drivers.
Asking the Important Questions: A Guide to Design Thinking And a Better Way to Serve Customers
Design thinking should be a way of life for senior managers. Melba Kurman spoke to Sara Beckman, design and innovation expert at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, about how to apply design thinking to the innovation process.
Innovation for Real Growth
Despite the noise around new forms of innovation many companies are not getting the results that matter – new products and highly scaled markets. Rob Shelton and John Riggs of PRTM look at how to really power up growth.
Eric Von Hippel on Innovation: Rethinking the User as Innovator
Eric Von Hippel has long been an advocate of user-led innovation but it is not always clear what user-led innovation really means. A newly released study on consumer innovation by Von Hippel reveals more than you might think. Haydn Shaughnessy delves deeper..
The Need for a New Product Development Process
This is the third part in a series of articles that take the need of innovation under the loop and share some of the imperatives, must haves if you will, to create and sustain “NEW” in business or organizations. This article focuses on the new product developing process.
Achieving Success in the Fuzzy Front End Phase of Innovation
Activities in the front end of the innovation process are often difficult to anticipate, overview and perform. Yet they are critical to successful outcomes of the innovation process. In light of a growing managerial interest in the front end, this article identifies key success factors for managing the front end, balancing acts which innovation managers need to address, as well as key contingencies affecting front end activities. Proficiency in the front end is indeed no easy task, but will have an enormous positive impact on performance for those firms that succeed.
Changing times –preparing for the ‘New Economy’
Perhaps your company’s product innovation process is one of the casualties of the Great Recession. Yet, you know that a steady release of new products or services into the marketplace remains the only way to stay strong and grow in an increasingly competitive world. Companies need to produce more with less, to make it faster, and to do it with reduced personnel. What do you do? Read more in this article by Dr. Scott J. Edgett.
Innovate to Thrive –The Importance of Inspiration
This is the first in a series of articles that take the need of Innovation under the loop and share some of the imperatives, must have’s if you will, to create and sustain “NEW” in business or organizations. The material is based on 25 years of hands on experience in the innovation space and the recently published book “Robert's rule of innovation”.
Discover New Possibilities with Reverse Innovation
Before the radical shifts in technology disrupt the industry fabric, there exists a great potential to appropriate value from the market through incremental product and business model innovations. The less intense the competition, less matured the market - larger is the potential. The emerging markets of the world the BRICs (where s could stand for the plurality as well as South Africa), have long been projected as the markets to invest in.
Innovating Products, Processes and Business Models in India
Over the past few years, innovation in India as a corporate theme has constantly gained importance, becoming a prerequisite for long-term success, or maybe even survival, due to the discontinuous pace of change of the environment. Thus, innovation has now reached for some companies as a corporate priority, affecting every single aspect of an organisation.
True Innovation – The Key to Success
“There are no quick fixes and no easy answers for succeeding at innovation” says Dr Robert Cooper, senior consultant to Fortune 500 firms and top scholar in the field of innovation management (PDMA) in an interview with InnovationManagement. “It’s back to basics – an aggressive innovation strategy that focuses your businesses’ R&D efforts; effective portfolio manage to pick tomorrow’s growth engines; a climate and culture that fosters innovation in your business; and a robust idea-to-launch system.”
Web-Enabled Open Innovation: From Hype to Reality
InnovationManagemenet is proud to present yet another experienced and knowledgeable columnist; Ehsan Ehsani, researcher and consultant in the area of innovation and product development. Ehsan is working with Accenture Product Innovation and PLM practice in New York City Office and has previous experience from a variety of firms both in Europe and the United States. This is the first in a series of columns starting off with a hot topic: Web-enabled open innovation.
Why executives should spend more time and less cash
Innovation management as a topic is wider than any single website can hope to cover completely. Marcus Linder, an innovation researcher at Chalmers, offers a regular column at innovationmanagement.se covering the most inspiring and actionable contents from other online sources, such as blogs and magazines. The first favorite link? Why executives should spend more time and less cash on innovative projects.
Adding Value to Customers Through Collaborative Innovation
The role of innovation in industry has changed. What used to be a closed and often secretive exclusive business of the R&D department is now being transformed to an open and collaborative eco system in many companies. InnovationManagement.se spoke to GBS Bindra, Global Innovation Director at Logica about the role of innovation.
An Overview of Idea Management Systems
Idea management technology helps organizations to gather ideas from all employees, evaluate them and bring them to market faster than ever before. Learn more about the typical features of these powerful tools, and the benefits they can provide to firms like yours.
Brainstorming Techniques for New Product Development
There are several ways to incorporate brainstorming into a new product development session. Here are two of the most productive techniques.
Innovation Strategy: Finding Alternative Uses of your Products
Finding innovative new uses for successful products and services can clearly increase your market size and, as a result, sales. Here are some tips from Jeffrey Baumgartner on how to apply this strategy to your firm
Innovation strategy: Does your new product idea really solve a customer problem?
Whether you're inventing teabags or nail polish, innovations that solve actual problems make more common sense to consumers than "bright ideas" that "assume" a problem.