How to Select Your Best Value Innovation Project – The Secret is in a Well-Managed Product Project Portfolio!

Innovation is on everyone's lips as a solution to post-COVID economic recovery. The world of innovation has a very broad definition: It’s often referred to as an information technology innovation... but our worldwide economy is still very reliant on manufacturing. How you select your best innovation project is undoubtedly a starting point!

Driving Exponential Online Growth by Creating and Reaching New Digital Customers

How can we succeed in the online world when it seems to be changing by the day? This article explores critical questions business leaders need to be asking themselves as they explore case examples and strategies that have been applied by others, examine how the technologies and capabilities of the ‘mobile first’ internet could evolve in the next few years and identify a set of practical actions they can adopt to drive exponential online sales growth.

The Importance of Senior Management Involvement for Innovation

Senior management is without a doubt a tough job. If you’re one of the few executives at the top of a large organization, there are likely hundreds of people; customers, employees, partners, and the list goes on; who are all looking for your attention regarding an endless sea of different topics and initiatives.

Involving the Crowd in Product Development

Even before the term was coined in Wired Magazine in 2006, crowdsourcing was utilized as a way to accomplish goals. The strategy had been used for several hundred years before it was officially given a name, but since being named, crowdsourcing has grown into a huge field, spawning subdivisions of the strategy and being used for a multitude of purposes. Wikipedia is one of the most recognizable and mainstream instances of crowdsourcing, designed to elicit and compile knowledge from the masses. Crowdsourcing has been used in real time to track public transportation and traffic updates with various apps.

A Strategy that Requires Innovation

Every executive knows that their teams should be more nimble, should be operating at a higher speed, and should be innovating. But these are all discrete capabilities, not necessarily in service to any greater strategy, and in fact much of what passes for strategy doesn’t understand how to take advantage of these capabilities. In this article, the authors describe the Maneuver Strategy from the new book, Outmaneuver. This strategy relies on innovation to achieve its goals, rather than accommodating innovation when it must.

10 Guidelines for Business Model Innovation in Established Companies

Leading CEOs worldwide expect major changes to their company’s business model until 2020. As a consequence, organizations are currently about to realize that, today, business model innovation has become as important as technological innovation. However, developing new and viable business models still represents a serious challenge for large incumbent firms despite their resources, know-how, and key technologies. This article provides 10 guidelines for mastering business model innovation challenges in established companies.

6 Mega-forces of Change that Affect Innovation

Today, there are six essential forces that are driving the changes that are occurring across much of today’s world. While these may not be the most pressing issues for your company, chances are that some combination of them will have a significant influence on your situation, on the strategic choices you make and thus on your approach to innovation.

Neuronal Innovation – the Next Big Thing After Open Innovation

This article shows how biomimicry can be put to effective use in designing innovative networks. It builds from similarities between the brain connectome and innovation networks to lead to a novel concept in innovation - Neuronal Innovation. This new concept shows how organizations can become proficient in deploying and using collaborative innovation.

Measuring the Practice of Collaborative Innovation

Developing and supporting the practice of collaborative innovation takes time and money. What do we assess to weigh its value? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins proposes focusing on strategic alignment of the program, relative advantage of the ideas, and engagement of the community members.

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.

Sustainable Innovation: Balancing Inspiration with Execution

Inspiration. Creativity. Meaning. Purpose. Human-centeredness. These terms are at the forefront of the very lively discussion around what design can bring to business and innovation -- and they are extremely powerful. Nicole Chen asks if design thinkers have thought enough about their new role.

The Purposeful Entrepreneur

What makes an entrepreneur's decision making different from an executive's and can the two ever meet? We asked investor and start-up champion Tony Fish to explore entrepreneur vs. executive innovator as he prepares to launch a novel new digital collaborative incubator in London.

The Best Time to Innovate is all the Time

This week InnovationManagement spoke with Idris Mootee - worldwide strategic innovation advisor and CEO of the global strategic innovation and design firm, Idea Couture Inc. Read more about his views on innovation management and why he’s passionate about transforming large, complex, even successful organizations into innovative organizations.

To Focus Employees on Innovation, Align Their Goals and Compensation

The ability to deliver new value requires systemic evolution in business strategy, culture, organizational design, and customer awareness. Employees can and will deliver new customer value, but the way they are paid and directed must change first and then the results will follow.