Why do so many companies seem to be sitting on the sidelines when it comes to creating connected products and designing services that tie into them? The cost of adding wireless connectivity to a device is plummeting toward $1. Projections about how many Internet of Things (IoT) objects will be part of our lives, at work or at home, range from 12 billion by 2020 (Cisco) to 50 billion (Ericsson and Intel).
Design Thinking Leaders discover innovative ideas by working through challenging, and often chaotic, situations where disruptive opportunities are typically hidden. These creativity-minded professionals embrace the consumer’s perspective and balance that with the brand’s needs and aspirations. The result? Simple, yet radical solutions that seem so obvious in hindsight.
In the past few years, the mass digitization of business and society has pressured every organization – large and small, private and public – to innovate at unprecedented speed. This digital revolution has incited a new and disruptive era of hyper competition. It has accelerated the pace of change exponentially. It has forced companies to reinvent themselves. And it has utterly disrupted institutions and their cultures, upended entire markets, and hatched new business models that challenge traditional ways of operating.
Since the release of the Global Innovation Index (GII) last year, the world economy has encountered a number of challenges that have led to further downgrades of global economic growth projections. In the context of such uncertainty, countries will seek ways to move the global economy out of its current holding pattern, thus avoiding a prolonged low-growth scenario. Innovation will be a critical ingredient to achieving this objective.
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.
In 1946, Soviet inventor and science fiction writer Genrich Altshuller developed a methodology called TRIZ. It became known as "the theory of inventive problem-solving" and was based on a simple premise: across different disciplines and applications, the same challenges occur again and again. Unfortunately, people keep solving nearly identical problems from scratch. The main lesson from TRIZ is this: if you understand how your innovation challenge is similar to someone else’s, you can reapply solutions that already exist, instead of reinventing the wheel time and again.
LEGO has earned the right to celebrate. Not only are kids playing with more mini LEGO people than there are human beings on the planet (Delingpole J, 2009) but in 2015, they were nominated by Forbes as the most powerful brand in the world. For a company which was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2004, the toy maker has made an amazing turnaround. They restructured, hired a new CEO, and forged more licensing partnerships than ever before. Most importantly, they discovered the secret to some of the world’s most successful, low risk innovation strategies.
This collection of case examples of IMP³rove innovation management support services for SMEs to gain competitive advantage illustrates the needs of key stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem. The case examples show how a wide variety of effective support services utilising the IMP³rove offerings address these needs.
Innovation that Matters examines and ranks 25 cities’ readiness to capitalize on the inevitable shift to a digital economy. It carves out critical trends every U.S. city leader can learn from and offers recommendations local leaders can adopt to strengthen their region’s digital competitiveness.
In the new global environment innovation is tending towards Platform Disruption, and is more focused on waves of change than single technology disruptions. The competitive capability of different innovation cultures, rather than technology, therefore becomes the critical success factor. In this article, Haydn Shaughnessy examines product and service platforms as the new organisational form and suggests that modern enterprises need to take the leap to a new way of business.
Companies are under pressure to innovate faster than ever, and collaboration beyond organizational boundaries is central to accelerated innovation. But few companies navigate collaboration well—or even find the right path to get started. To move forward, companies must change their operating models to enable “digital shoring,” the latest evolution of organizational “shoring” approaches.
This is the second part of a 2-part series on a study that innovation.support conducted. In the study we wanted to find out where leading firms from various industry sectors set their priorities in developing the early phase of their innovation funnels (“Fuzzy Front-End”). In this article we want to provide you with the key findings of our study.
The term “Fuzzy Front-End” (FFE) has been established for the early stage of innovation which determines the innovation effectiveness and hence ultimately innovation success. We wanted to better understand where leading firms are setting their priorities in the FFE currently and where they see things going in the future. To answer this, we conducted a study. Our train of thought and the main findings are in a two-part article series published here.
The state of the global innovation economy is alive and well, according to a recent survey report featuring organisations actively developing and implementing new technologies and solutions across a range of industries.
Although a lot of companies would undoubtedly prefer to keep all of their operations in-house, this sometimes isn’t realistic. Whether you are suffering from budget or other resource restrictions, lack of personnel or a general lack of time to do a high-quality job, many other organisations are available to handle things on your behalf.
