The innovation process requires considerable amounts of trust. The innovation process involves risk both for the firm running the process and employees participating in the process. Jeffrey Baumgartner outlines some practical ways to increase the level of trust, and therefore the level of innovation, in your firm.
Continuous innovation is not easy and if you keep using the same method you will experience diminishing results. Try innovating how you innovate by employing some of these ideas from Paul Sloane.
Corporate innovation has traditionally been driven from the technology side; from departments like R&D and engineering. It’s an approach that can be very successful. Indeed, it has often led to great breakthroughs. But if a company wants to win in today’s value-based economy, this is no longer the best way of doing things.
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.
There is one area in which open innovation differs significantly from in-house innovation: the legal element. The consequences of ignoring the legal side of open innovation can be catastrophically expensive, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Successful organizations worldwide realize how important it is to their success to nourish creativity and innovation. Innovation is, after all, the vanguard to increased competitiveness. In my years of experience in the development of innovative electronic products, innovation challenges have necessitated the gathering and practice of techniques from many arenas. Here are a few ideas that we have developed in my company. I hope that they will help you to expand and enable innovation in your organization, too.
Rowan Gibson explains how intellectual capital has become an outdated way to measure an organization's worth. What's needed are new measures used to create value today, such as imagination capital, entrepreneurial capital and relationship capital.
Start-up companies are almost synonymous with innovation, while the well established companies are usually perceived as being risk averse and much less innovative. In this article Jeffrey Baumgartner uses Prospect Theory to better understand how executives perceive risk and innovation opportunities.
With everyone and her aunt now involved in innovation and a never ending stream of articles, blog posts and books being published on the topic, we need to be sure we are clear on the basics of innovation, particularly corporate or organizational innovation.
There are six potential types of failure within innovation systems. Are all of yours healthy?
Rapid prototyping technologies enable innovative companies to quickly and inexpensively develop rough prototypes of new products and components - which can help them to nurture an innovative design through multiple iterations and bring the final product to market faster. As such, it represents a potentially potent innovation edge.
You have doubtless visited a hotel or restaurant or other service business where a small box invited you to offer suggestions on "how can we better serve you?" Very likely, you never bothered to make a suggestion because, like most people, you sincerely doubted anything would happen to your suggestion. Indeed, I often wondered if such boxes were ever emptied and suggestions read! In other words, you probably didn't make the effort to offer a suggestion because there seemed to be no purpose to doing so.
There are two key reasons why downsizing is bad for innovation. Neither is immediately obvious, explains Jeffrey Baumgartner in this must-read article.
The sixth major issue to be tackled by our distinguished panel of innovation practitioners is the all-import issue of metrics: How do you measure innovation results and outcomes and motivate the organization to deliver across all stages of the process, and what are the best metrics for measuring innovation performance?
Within larger organizations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. Every organization has to find ways to promote internal communication and collaboration and to fight internal division and competition. Here are some ideas from Paul Sloane for breaking down barriers to communication.
