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!
Surveys show that the large majority of senior executives see innovation as critical for their businesses but what if you want to make your organization more agile and innovative where should you start? You could launch a big initiative with grand statements, training classes and an ideas scheme but you tried all those last year and they fizzled out. It is better to begin with a brutally honest assessment of what is preventing innovation from happening today.
In this episode of the Innovation Ecosystem podcast, we are joined by Jenny Fielding, Managing Director at Techstars, a global venture capital fund for innovative tech startups. Mark and Jenny discuss her extraordinary success scaling and exiting her first startup in three years, how she moved a legacy organization like BBC into the new digital era by founding BBC Labs, and why infusing corporate and startup culture is so powerful.
Innovation has become a business mantra and a word that threatens to lose all meaning every time it’s uttered at another conference or thrown into another book title. But in spite of its omnipresence it continues to be essential – a growing field – and one of the only practices that might save businesses from extinction.
In the second article on innovation stakeholder management, Anthony Ferrier focuses on two examples where he tried to generate broad support for innovation efforts with varying degrees of success. The lessons learned from these experiences provide insights for practitioners to successfully navigate stakeholder relations.
You would be hard-pressed to find a business leader who would question the importance of innovation not only to promote growth within their organization, but also to ensure its very survival. These business leaders have invested significantly in their innovation initiatives to support this importance. Yet a 2012 Accenture study found that more than half of corporate executives were disappointed by their innovation results and returns from their innovation investments.
Every innovation project starts from an idea or a problem and mostly, all innovation teams do jump immediately to the feasibility study and scenario analysis dedicating little or no time to the assessment of the risks of innovation projects. This series of article represents an extended dashboard of internal, external and hidden risks of such projects in aiding innovation teams throughout their risk management activities. The first article looks deeper into what drives a successful innovation eco-system.
The Idea Game is a new group brainstorming tool that corporate teams can use to generate fresh ideas and insights. Developed by Swedish creativity consulting firm Realize AB, it provides a variety of creative stimuli using a card deck and game board to generate ideas, and "idea battles" to help identify and improve upon the best ideas.
Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) is an innovation framework developed by InnoCentive that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowd sourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. We asked Dr. Frank Ermark, working with innovation portfolio management at Nokia Mobile Phones about his point of view on CDI.
For any corporate innovation initiative to succeed, it is important that it is aligned with corporate strategy. Jeffrey Baumgartner shares a simple three step approach to help ensure that this happens and to avoid common pitfalls.
The third major issue to be tackled by our distinguished panel of innovation practitioners is connecting innovation to business strategy. Specifically, how do you connect innovation to business strategy, and get the funding and senior management commitment to follow through on both short- and long-term innovation initiatives?
