7 Steps to Reconcile Co-Innovation and Confidentiality: How Secret Should Your Co-Innovation Transformation Be?

In an increasingly competitive, connected and globalized world, co-innovation and value co-creation have recently become the norm for all R&D projects from startups to large organizations. In fact, co-innovation is critical to the development and sustainability of organizations of all sizes and and all industries.

The Secrets to Making Open Innovation Projects Work

Open innovation often requires global teams with national culture differences to work together, which presents some challenges. Here’s how to navigate them.

Integrating Agile with Stage-Gate® – How New Agile-Scrum Methods Lead to Faster and Better Innovation

Recent experiences show that Agile project-management methods can be used in the innovation process and has a great potential to reduce development time and increase the success rate of new products. The article briefly outlines how an Agile method, such as Scrum, can be used within a structured innovation process with milestones and decision points, such as Stage-Gate®, and what benefits it provides to both manufacturers and service-providers.

Speed of Innovation – How to Master Rapid Prototyping

In the disciplined and structured process of innovation we search for unmet needs and unfulfilled desires, and when we think we find them we have to construct a sort of a mental map that defines why our proposed solution will be better than whatever currently exists. We may use the business model map to show how we’re using this innovation to move up and to the right, or we may use the customer value ladder to show how this innovation provides differentiated value. And once we’re convinced that our idea is a really good one, the next step is often prototyping.

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.

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.

Adaptability and Collaboration for Sustainable Business Growth

The four simple axioms in the “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development” express the core values for getting work done efficiently. In the last chapter excerpt of Agile Innovation we looked at individuals and interactions as well how to create a rapid working prototype. Today we’ll continue discussing the next elements: collaboration and carrying out change in a corporate setting.

Becoming Agile Rapidly and Painlessly

To take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s unique opportunities, and to rise above the intense existential challenges your firm will face in the months and years ahead, it will be supremely helpful and confer enormous advantages if your operations embody the Agile essence: quick, responsive, dynamic, innovative. You’ve got to learn to recognize opportunities and to act on them faster than your competitors do. In this chapter excerpt of Agile Innovation Langdon Morris explores what Agile means in detail, with a focus on the roots of the Agile movement and its many insights and implications for today’s organizations.

The Secret Sauce of Innovation

Could it be that today’s pervasive bad news, the news that causes everyone else to moan and complain—the economic malaise, the chaos that the digital revolution created, the impacts of outsourcing, political instability, global competition—can offer amazing opportunities to out- distance your competition? In this second chapter excerpt from the new book, Agile Innovation, Langdon Morris explores innovation-under-duress.

Starting at Sprint Zero: A Better Way to Innovate

How is Agile changing the world? Let’s begin with a bit of background. If you are new to Agile Software technique, then the term sprint zero, as used in the title of this chapter, may not mean much to you, but for Agile practitioners it means the initial phase of work where you sort the project out to make sure you start properly when you’re about to tackle a large programming endeavor.

Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity

Charles Darwin said it quite well: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Innovation, collaboration, and improvisation are indeed essential forces shaping all of business and all of modern life, and they’ve become vitally important for the individual, the organization, and indeed for all of society.

Fostering Innovation through Effective Risk Management

Risk management can provide visibility, analytical insights and governance that can help companies better manage and optimize their innovation portfolio. In this article Adi Alon and Ken Hooper look at learnings from the VC industry and risk management practices to provide three principles that can drive higher return from an innovation investment.

A New Approach to Manage Disruptive Innovation in an Environment of High Uncertainty

Existing methods for the management of innovation projects have a low probability of success in the development of radical or disruptive innovations. A new spiral approach has been developed that provides the balance of flexibility and control needed for a repeatable and successful approach to disruptive innovation.

Strategy as an Innovative Design Process

Unpredictable, turbulent markets and fluid industry boundaries characterize today's global economy. Yet our approaches to strategic planning, formed in the closed markets of the Industrial Age, often assume exactly the opposite. As a result, companies are mired in commoditization, industry disruptions from unexpected competitors, stalled growth, and tentative strategies. To gain the agility needed to thrive in today's complex and demanding open markets, strategy must become an innovative design process focused on value creation, says Kay Plantes.