Are Corporate Innovation Centers The Last Hope for Companies Too Big To Fail?

Companies once deemed “too big to fail” are increasingly exposed to failure. The threat of disruption is everywhere. Startups are taking on the Goliaths in every market. Scores of malls across the United States are in collapse. Many household brand names are losing ground or even shutting completely. Regardless of industry, businesses face digital Darwinism, the evolution of technology and markets. Disruption is just a matter of when, where and why. To compete, executives must make tough decisions but more so, they must look to new horizons for new insight and direction. Whether companies thrive or cower in the face of digital Darwinism is a choice.

The Digital Tsunami

These days, when migrants arrive at a refugee camp, one of the first things they ask for is access to WiFi and electricity to recharge their cell phones. Their smartphone is as basic a resource for survival as food and water. This is a vivid reminder of the fact that we are fully immersed in a digital world.

Digital or Dead – An Expert Study

Nearly all executives have acknowledged the relevance of digitization and related trends, such as the Internet of Things, connectivity, and industry 4.0. However, the full impact of digitization has usually not been understood in detail. Moreover, most firms struggle to implement digitization initiatives successfully.

Disruption Planning 2- Creating Options and Pathways

In this in-depth article Haydn Shaughnessy discusses why traditional ROI decision making is becoming irrelevant and how options planning is a key element of competitiveness. In these uncertain times firms need to recognise and analyse their options thoroughly in order to be ready for inevitable change.

7 Steps to Platform Transformation – Part I

Too many notes, Mozart was once told. Too many ideas, we might say today. The culture of innovation is awash with idea generation and its sidekick, fail-fast fail cheap innovation. Worse, we need a culture of transformation not just innovation. Accenture recently reported that 81% of executives they interviewed see platforms as central to their strategy over the next three years.

The Dynamism in Chinese Ecosystems and Platforms

Today we have to “think China” when it comes to looking for the dynamism within Ecosystems and Platforms. They are leading, exploring and extending the thinking beyond our more limited ambitions in the West. It is the environmental conditions coming together or being explored and exploited that make China stand out in its dynamism in this area.

The Importance of Collaboration in the Digital Economy

What’s the future for the connected car, for digital financial services, or for smart and sustainable cities in the new industrial reality? How are innovations and technical developments in 5G, the Internet of Things and spectrum management impacting on future networks and future businesses? And if meaningful, affordable connectivity is the single best bet for accelerating socio-economic development and meeting the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), how can we ensure we reach the billions of unconnected most in need?

Platform Disruption Wave

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.

Digital Shoring for Networked Innovation

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.

An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself

Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers. Using external resources can often avoid pitfalls and align the portal success rate to corporate expectations, objectives and ambitions. Here six questions are asked that can help you take the decision whether to launch a managed portal internally or externally.

Corporate Open Innovation Portals, Part II: Two Successful Case Examples

Jos Tissen of Unilever, based in the Netherlands, and Shawn Heipp of Elmer’s Products, based in Ohio, USA, have something in common. Each manages his company’s corporate innovation portal, the website used to encourage technology solution submissions from external customers, suppliers, inventors, and businesses. Tissen and Heipp describe their unique portal implementation choices and their results to date.

Corporate Open Innovation Portals: An Active Part of an Open Innovation Strategy

As part of the Open Innovation movement, many companies now actively solicit technical solutions, products and business ideas from innovators, customers, suppliers, and the broader marketplace of technology providers. Some companies have begun utilizing structured innovation submission programs, typically implemented through their corporate websites. This article, the first in a two-part series, helps companies understand Collaborative vs. Direct Portals, and the importance of IP-anti-contamination and efficient filtering in choosing the best innovation portals for their unique situations.

The Driving Forces of Change

Six major forces are driving change in today’s world. Developing a successful innovation program requires that your organization understand and master all of them.

Packaging Innovation in the Digital Age: a Smarter User Interface?

Packaging is already a concentrated form of brand communication, expertly coded by designers using form, materials, colors and symbols to tell a brand story; or to make an innovation approachable and understandable. Now that packaging is becoming part of the digital revolution, how can we best enhance its communication potential?

Engagement Is Key to Business Performance: Digital Innovation as Catalyst

Booz&Co wrote in their article “The Social Life of Brands” on Strategy+Business that the value of a brand is linked with the relationships it has with its customers, creating and retaining them. For marketing, its fundamental task is managing these relationships. In a recent research by Gallup the results were striking, a 240 percent boost in performance was achieved when both employees and customers were enaged. This is exactly, in a highly technological driven business environment, digital innovation is the catalyst that improves engagement and provide means to manage relationships better, faster and in a cheaper way though digital.