How to Increase your ‘Return on Innovation’?

While the importance of innovation is crystal clear for many organizations, daily execution usually remains challenging. When renewing products, services or business processes, companies often encounter the same obstacles. But what if companies could learn from each other? Can innovation be streamlined by sharing successes and failures? That’s precisely what the first CREAX innovation roundtable was determined to find out. In collaboration with Oracle, we gathered a diverse group of innovation professionals for a lively debate on how to move from theorizing to getting things done. This is what we learned.

Top Diagramming Techniques for more Efficient Meetings

Do you ever find yourself stuck in a meeting that’s stalling? Does the agenda seem to accomplish no tangible outcomes? Perhaps you find yourself wondering what’s next after an important summit, or frustrated with the lack of direction after a meaningful brainstorm or discussion.

How to Assess an Innovation Training Program

As innovation becomes an important skill set, large organizations will seek to obtain training for their employees. We stand on the brink of an innovation training “land rush” with few rules and little information to identify the best programs. Evaluating an innovation training program is critical. Assess programs based on their depth, the experience of the trainers, the referenced body of knowledge and the inclusion of practical examples and hands-on exercises. Ignore certifications, because no standard exists.

How to Shock Management into Rethinking the Business Model – Prove They can be Blindsided by a Fingerprint

Despite a detailed process with countless hours of work, and sincere efforts to take a longer-term, strategic look at where to play and how to win, many businesses fail to anticipate fundamental shifts that should cause them to rethink their entire business model. The results are often disastrous - too many businesses end up on life support. This article presents a new concept called “Competitive Fingerprints” that will allow readers to anticipate shifts and adapt their business model to capitalize on future market realities.

How to Increase Engagement in Enterprise Innovation and Develop a Sustainable Program

Maintaining and building high-quality engagement over time should be the focus of all innovation managers as they strive to develop sustainable enterprise programs. This article shares key activities you can undertake in order to boost engagement with your program.

Do-it-Yourself Open Innovation: Start By Looking In the Mirror

To succeed in a fast-paced competitive global economy, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) are increasingly adopting Open Innovation (OI) management strategies. A lack of resources, however, frequently requires SMEs to implement OI strategies on their own without the assistance of a management strategy professional. This article offers clear, do-it-yourself steps to initiate an OI program successfully within an SME.

How to Unseat the Incumbent

Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?

Breaking the ISE: Mashup for Innovation Success

Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.

How To Become A Business Model Architect

Our first article in this series, titled “Include Business Model Review as a New Year Resolution”, described a method to reveal weaknesses in your business model. So, what do you do next after you complete your business model assessment and find weaknesses in one or more of its cornerstones? You find Value Accelerators (VA)™! VA’s are specific and market-proven ideas, assets or strategies that directly accelerate revenue and profit growth. This article discusses how to develop, assess and prioritize the best VAs to strengthen weaknesses in your business model. It also gives you a link to download an example of a scorecard to help prioritize the VAs.

A Simple Template for Choosing an Innovation Challenge

People who practice collaborative innovation envision a compelling future. They transform their communities, their organizations, and themselves by helping people realize their potential for leadership as they form and evolve ideas. Reality check: effective visionaries use pragmatic tactics to move from point A to B. In this article, innovation architect Doug Collins shares a simple template that practitioners can use to help sponsors of innovation challenges choose where to begin their journey.

Designing the Perfect Ideas Competition

What's the most effective way to design an idea competition that doesn't just result in a huge pile of ideas, but enables teams to implement ideas that will help to make your organization more creative? Jeffrey Baumgartner shares one practical framework for making this happen.

How to Make Business Model Innovation Happen

One of many good reasons for you to focus on your business model is that companies focusing on Business Model Innovation outperform their industry peers in terms of operating margin and total shareholder return. In this in depth article Marc Sniukas provides you with a framework to describe your business model in three easy steps; a process to start and drive Business Model Innovation within your company and an overview of tools and how they can be used in Business Model Innovation.

Part 4: Robust Process Design: Fulfilling Individual Customer Needs without Compromising Performance

Offering customized products is a strain on a company's resources. What are the different ways that you can minimize the deterioration in the firm’s operations and supply chain? In part four in this series on mass customization, Frank Piller and Fabrizio Salvador explain the robust process design - whereby the firm reuses or re-combines existing organizational and value chain resources to fulfill differentiated customers’ needs.

2019-10-15T15:10:17-07:00April 30th, 2012|Categories: Enabling Factors|Tags: , , , |

How to Create an Innovation Mission Statement

Often individuals and organizations tend to get stuck in the mode of talking about innovation and/or trying to understand innovation. The only way to really know innovation is to do innovation, and learn from your mistakes along the way. In this article Harun Asad suggests preparing an Innovation Mission Statement as an initial, action-oriented way to get out of the rhetoric trap.