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.
One of the things that was surprising to us at IdeaScale was that many of our customers came to us looking for idea management software not because they didn’t have enough good ideas, but because they simply needed a place for those ideas to live. How could that be the main reason?
What separates the great innovators from the industry laggards? What empowers long-standing hierarchical organizations like LEGO to make big, creative bets that pay off (like the LEGO Movie) while other once-great brands like Tower Records, Pan Am, or Pets.com have all gone away?
With the rise of the innovation department, numerous organizations are focusing their attention on their company’s ideation rate. A good ideation rate generally predicts other positive company health indicators: profitability, higher employee retention rates, reported customer success, but there’s another innovation health indicator that we think organizations should pay attention to: their implementation rate.
Before being acquired by Facebook for US$1 billion, Instagram was just another photo-sharing app operating with insignificant infrastructure and a dozen employees. With the ever-increasing potential of modern technology, the next billion-dollar business could start from the comfort of someone’s home. To stay on top, established organisations need to stimulate innovation... and that’s our topic today.
IdeaScale has honored innovation leaders in their annual Innovation Management Awards for six years now. Award recipients have come from almost every industry with a variety of goals (from eradicating cancer to identifying new university technology best practices), but this year’s winners share a few key characteristics that all innovation leaders need to embody.
Innovation isn’t a one-time project. It’s a continuous activity. Which is why we are seeing numerous organizations adding an innovation department to their company infrastructure. In fact, in a recent survey of our client base, we were surprised to learn that almost 40% of our customers operate out of a dedicated innovation group.
In a recent audit of site content on InnovationManagement.se, site publishers noticed that although there is a great deal of information about how to architect and run idea management programs, there isn’t a whole lot of information about how to implement ideas.
A common misconception is that innovation can’t be taught. Similar to how some people believe that artists are born, not made – innovation has often seemed to be the purview of the great thinkers, the elite, people whose creativity is given, not a matter of practice…
Organizational innovation requires discipline. And like any other discipline, it requires monitoring and training to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of your capabilities. But what skills should you focus on building and how can you track your progress?
When it comes to transformation programs, internal alignment forms the foundation for strategic success. Naturally, aligning an organisation to its strategic priorities requires serious upfront investment in terms of time. But without this time, it’s a case of ‘fail to prepare – prepare to fail’.
In our previous posts, we’ve made two major points. One: innovation is vital for the long-term survival of any business. And two: a handful of crazy ideas won’t cut the mustard. Successful innovation is a complex process that requires a whole lot more than just riotous creativity. Based on academic research, and in close collaboration with professor Frederik Anseel (Ghent University), we’ve defined three innovation profiles: ideators, champions and implementers. Each of these personas has a crucial part to play in what we like to call ‘innovation dream teams’. What makes them unique and why do you need all three? Let’s take a closer look.
In-house innovation programs are an emerging phenomenon. Many businesses and government organizations are formalizing processes around the innovation practice in order to keep pace with competition and the rapidly changing expectations of the public.
Most companies recognize the need for breakthrough innovation – it can change the fundamental bases of competition, “rewrite the rules” of an industry and transform the prospects of the successful innovator. There is no one-size-fits-all model for how best to respond to this challenge. Arthur D. Little surveyed over 80 large organizations to explore how to deliver a consistent pipeline of radically new products, performance features, business models and market space.
Open Innovation is becoming an essential part of an enterprise innovation strategy. Yet, so often, companies focus on getting a narrow set of tactical activities going without thinking through the strategic and organizational issues necessary to enable those activities to have the intended impact. This brief article covers a few of the implementation challenges faced by companies seeking to establish successful Open Innovation programs.
