In 2011 The World Economic Forum had focus on the Nordic Model as a case of a region, which had came out the financial crunch better than most other regions. In February 2013 The Economist had a feature article titled ’The Nordic Countries – The Next Supermodel" stating that politicians from both right and left could learn from the Nordic countries. The question is would Schumpeter agree today?
Strategic alliances are an effective way to provide diversity of resources and gain entry to new knowledge and markets. Large corporations have entered recently into alliances with public sector organizations to support innovation in SMEs, combining private and public policy agendas. This article looks into the structure and management of these strategic alliances, their strong practices and inhibitors and how they impact the different parties involved.
The analyses and stories told about Amundsen and Scott’s fascinating and epic race to the South Pole are numerous. In this article I will try to make sense of the race in relation to the lessons derived in view of companies entering the white space[1] or aspiring to succeed with disruptive innovations. The lessons begin from using the holistic innovation management framework the Innovation Radar (IR) published in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2006[2].
Successful open innovation relies on intermediaries and platforms connecting an organization with outside solution providers, so called open innovation accelerators (OIAs). With more than 180 players, the market for OIAs however is getting complex and difficult to navigate. A recent study by RWTH Aachen compared these OIA market. In this report, we summarize some of the main findings.
This is the second of two articles, co-written by Ralph-Christian Ohr and Kevin McFarthing. In our previous post, we discussed how Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) ensures that the content of the portfolio is driven by innovation strategy and associated targets. We would now like to move on to Operational Portfolio Management (OPM), where the portfolio directs resource allocation, metrics and reporting on an operational and tactical level. The link between the two is shown in Figure 1 below.
In this article, the final in a series of six, Professor Jean-Philippe Deschamps, discusses the imperatives for an effective innovation governance system. Innovation performance is often not directly dependent on the type of governance model used. Rather, innovation performance reflects the strength of top management’s commitment and engagement, and the credibility, skills and energy of the actors who under take the governance mission.
The recent economic crisis has confronted companies across Europe with major challenges. Small and medium sized companies in particular seemed to have a customer base too reduced to maintain their business. In such a situation there are two options: invest in developing new customers or invest in developing new, more attractive, offerings.
Facing increasingly dynamic and unpredictable environments, firms are required to develop convenient innovation strategies, constantly adapt them to changing conditions and properly implement strategically aligned initiatives throughout their organizations. Innovation portfolio management (IPM) can act as the pivotal tool to translate strategic objectives and priorities into project-based innovation activities. Furthermore, it provides a framework to convert raw ideas into real investment opportunities, based on their risk profile.
In the first part of a 3-part article series innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Integrative Innovation’s Ralph-Christian Ohr worked out why successful firms need to balance radical and incremental innovation. They introduced the concept of organizational ambidexterity as an appropriate way for simultaneously conducting exploration and exploitation, the two paradigms behind radical and incremental innovation.This second part shows some best practice examples of how the most innovative firms are setting up organizational ambidexterity.
From incremental to breakthrough innovation projects, managers need to handle different activities and with them dissimilar venues of risks. In this article the internal, external and hidden risks of incremental, differential, radical, and breakthrough innovation projects are identified and ranked accordingly. In addition, for every category a general innovation eco-system has been analyzed.
As the economy is dynamically changing and innovation becomes crucially important, a look into the management practices and risks that such projects face should always be welcome. In part two of this series of articles focused on identifying risks on innovation projects, the attention will be directed towards the identification of the internal and hidden risks of innovation projects.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) initiatives often miss their true potential and make projects unnecessarily costly. Not understanding how to optimize these investments can have long-term effects on both the top and bottom line, while companies that realize how to use PLM as a competitive weapon can capture significant market advantages. In this article we give you insights into how to take an approach that addresses the true potential of a PLM investment.
Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, but how sure can we be that this is something we can predict effectively? In this article Tony Ulwick argues that the traditional voice of the customer methodology is the wrong tool to determine customer needs. Tony presents an alternative methodology that makes it possible to determine all the needs of a given customer group.
The Nordic countries have a high number of start-up companies but are struggling with scaling their entrepreneurs, start-ups and innovations to global large-scale operations and companies. Yet, one Nordic company namely Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems managed to become world-beater within the global wind turbine industry. But but after 2008 Vestas has experienced a near death experience and is struggling for survival. Vestas’ story holds important lessons for other Nordic companies, not only within the renewable energy industry. It will here be argued that had Vestas paid more attention to what the management guru Peter Drucker labeled the five deadly business sins Vestas might have avoided getting into dire straits.
Thanks to loads of compelling research studies and best practice cases in open innovation (OI) carried out over the last decade, several companies nowadays begin to embrace and partially apply the new principles and methods OI offers. However, when managing open innovation at the project level, even experienced managers still go blank at the question: how to assess, control, and measure the performance of these activities? In this series of articles, we will address the above issue by discussing a general framework for an open innovation performance measurement system (Part 1). Given this framework, a metricsbased management toolkit will be presented that provides a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific set of OI methods that demonstrates the key results of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 Study (Part 2).
