How to Create a Competitive Advantage Through Innovation

In the modern world of business, innovation is both an equalizer and a differentiator. It can give tiny startups an edge over global conglomerates and enable industry leaders to develop competitive advantages.

Whitepaper: Stimulating and Measuring Open and Cross Innovation 

As two intermediaries from Hamburg that foster open and cross innovation processes, Science Scout (an initiative of Hamburg Innovation) and Cross Innovation Hub (Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft) joined forces to start a discussion around the stimulation and measurement of open and cross innovation processes.

Leveraging Alien Thinking: Exclusive Interview with Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade

For the past decade, Cyril BouquetJean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.

Interview with Erich Joachimsthaler, Author of The Interaction Field

I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Erich Joachimsthaler, the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi, one of the largest independent global strategy and business transformation firms, to talk with him about his new book The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, to explore the important role that connections play in both business and innovation.

A Successful Approach to Corporate Innovation: ‘The 8 Ps of Innovation’

The business environment is becoming increasingly complex. Organizations have lived in a stable environment for many decades. The competitive advantage resulted from executing better than competitors. This is no longer the case.

The Essential Skills to Teach Intrapreneurs

At JR Simplot, a new cross-functional innovation initiative recently formed looking for ideas that would help optimize company efficiency, improve training programs, and more. And when they built this team, they realized that a big part of launching an innovation initiative was education. Learn more in this podcast.

He-Man can Teach You Powerful Lessons about how to Successfully Manage Continuous Innovation

The whiplash journey of Mattel’s beloved kids’ toy range perfectly sums up the fundamentals and key challenges of managing continuous, successful corporate innovation.

5 Tips to Create a Strong Product Vision

Every startup and growth-oriented business needs to focus on innovation in order to come up with compelling brand stories and messages, engaging products and services, and amazing marketing tactics that will put the company on the map and allow it to become an authority in its niche.

2021-12-20T11:25:52-08:00January 28th, 2020|Categories: Strategies, Support for SMEs|Tags: , , , |

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.

Resist The Urge To Shortcut Stages in Design Thinking

To stay relevant in the digital era, most companies are considering design thinking, but continue to be immersed in a “Build it, and they will come” mindset. Often, due to a sense of urgency to play catch-up or disrupt the market, they skip empathy and define stages of design thinking and jump to ideation and build a prototype of the new solution.

2021-12-17T12:55:54-08:00March 3rd, 2019|Categories: Strategies|Tags: , |

Effectively shifting gears between the different phases of the Innovation Pipeline

Adventurous as the word innovation may sound, an innovation consultant’s job consists for a large part in de-risking the innovation process. In order for innovation to be a viable undertaking for any company, the outcomes of the innovation need to be maximized, while the risk involved needs to be contained as much as possible.

It’s All About Interaction!

The central role of Interaction Design when creating delightful customer experiences

Organisations depend on their competitive advantage in order to become or keep successful, relevant for their customers and grow over time. As we all know, competitive advantage is achieved via either one – or a combination - of the strategies involving pricing, service and product quality or customer service excellence. We argue that another overarching strategy should always be present in a company’s strategy; delivering an excellent, desirable and memorable customer experience.

Strengthening Your Intra- and Inter-Department Partnership – The Welcome Side Effect of Design Thinking

Imagine a world where customer service, procurement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and sales can truly help each other and work together, instead of stepping on each others’ toes and pointing fingers. A world where all parts of the organizations work together with a shared sense of purpose, no matter how different their cultures, processes, and systems, have been in the past.