4 Intrapreneurs on the Blues And Bliss of Big Company Innovation

Life as an innovator can be exciting and terrifying at the same time. The Intrapreneurship Conference is taking over Stockholm for the next three days. We are featuring 25+ intrapreneurs on stage- sharing their approaches and results, their challenges and failures, and their personal hopes and fears. We started the day with trending topics. We asked our four presenters about their lives as innovators in large companies – and how they keep their energy up also when times are though.

A Simple Process Leads to a Complex Outcome: Interview with Luke Mansfield, VP, Innovation, PepsiCo

At PepsiCo, beverages are developed in a new approach to breakthrough Innovation. Everybody wants Innovation to be simple, but whilst the result may be simple, getting there is anything but. At FEI Europe Luke Mansfield will share new thinking on process, tools and techniques and new ways to collaborate to launch multiple new global brands.

2019-10-15T15:24:09-07:00May 2nd, 2017|Categories: Blog Archive, Interview|Tags: , |

AI is Best Delivered as Service because there is Always Something that Needs Special Adjustment

In this Innoboard interview with Dr. Joseph Reger, Fujitsu Fellow and Chief Technology Officer at Fujitsu EMEIA, he discusses his take on the nature of innovation, the best opportunities for using AI at Fujitsu, why AI is best delivered as a service rather than a product, and much more.

Don’t Fall in Love with your First Idea

In this interview, Dr. Alexander Osterwalder, Author and Co-Founder of Strategyzer, discusses what he believes to be the essential success factors of innovation and why his Business Model Canvas has become such a popular tool for organisations today.

Artificial Intelligence is an important Component of Digital Transformation

We are all part of a giant transformation, “digital world is eating up physical world” – enterprise, individual, activity, relationship, emotion, etc., almost every entity around us is getting through some degree of digitization. Michael Wei, Director of Samsung AI research center in the US, discusses the current developments, activities and challenges in artificial intelligence and its part in the digital transformation agenda.

Innovation Management in Emerging Markets

When it comes to innovation management, I see a growing number of companies in emerging countries like Turkey, Mexico and Brazil doing a better job than their counterparts in developed (primarily Western) countries. There are many reasons for this and here you get some of my observations.

What your Definition of Innovation Says about Your Company

In a field centered around fresh, outside-the-box thinking, it is no wonder that there is such a broad range of definitions for the term innovation. Creating a clear-cut definition for the term is critical in shaping the culture of innovation at your organization and will help you determine which resources to allocate to your program.

The Next Level of Open Innovation: Is Your Organization Ready?

Getting started with open innovation and developing the right foundation for open innovation has been a key challenge at many companies in the last three to five years. Now, internal as well as external forces are moving these companies towards the next level of open innovation in which we go beyond just products and technology and start to explore how a more open and collaborative mindset can be applied to all more business units and functions. Think procurement and engineering as examples.

How to Innovate Efficiently: Six Ways to ‘Unfuzzy’ the Front-end

Kittens are ‘fuzzy’ because they’re soft and fluffy. But if someone uses the same word to describe the early stages – or ‘front-end’ – of an innovation process, the meaning is less cute. In that case, ‘fuzzy’ means ‘blurry’, ‘unclear’ or even ‘incoherent’. In many cases, innovation projects start off as chaotic and seemingly aimless ventures. In fact, this happens so often, that organizations tend to accept the ‘fuzzy front-end of innovation’ as a necessary evil. At CREAX, we believe front-end fuzziness can and should be drastically reduced in order to innovate efficiently.

Multi-tasking – The Challenge of Intermediaries in SME Support for Innovation

In view of creating more competitive regions and industry sectors, innovation capabilities of SMEs play a central role. SMEs are strong economic drivers in many countries, and their ability to innovate will determine the health of national and regional economies in the future. A key support for SMEs in their innovation efforts are public innovation support programmes.

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.

Do You Know the Seven Stages of Innovation?

At IdeaScale, we define prolific innovators as organizations that have moved more than half of their ideas to the final stage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every suggested idea became a value-generating, implemented reality. This means that the completed ideas had each been investigated, responded to, and a decision was made to move forward or not. But of course, at least a portion of those completed ideas generate measurable constructive outcomes.

Six Levers For Solving The Corporate Innovation Problem – Part 3

This is the third part of a three-part article series. We are investigating why – despite all the investments made into the early phase of innovation – innovation results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. In the first part we illustrated that companies are investing heavily into the early phase of innovation. In the second part, we provided some metrics on the corporate innovation problem and found that the corporate innovation problem actually consists of a “complexity” problem” and a “system problem”. In this article, we show six levers to change the “system problem” and think this is the way to solve the corporate innovation problem – and ultimately to increase innovation performance.

Everyone Talks About Innovation … But What is it Really?

From manufacturing to accounting: in every sector, organizations sooner or later declare themselves ‘innovative players’. Sad but true: as a mantra for businesses far and wide, ‘innovation’ too often becomes a catchphrase devoid of meaning. So let’s break it down and get back to the nitty-gritty: what is innovation exactly, and why should you care about the word’s core meaning?

Six Levers for Solving The Corporate Innovation Problem – Part 2

This is the second part of a three-part article series. In the first part we illustrated that firms are investing heavily into the early phase of innovation. In this second part we show that despite of all these investments, innovation results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. We provide some metrics and find that there are two root causes. In the upcoming third part we will suggest that six levers can be used to address one of the root causes. We believe that moving these levers can provide a solution to the corporate innovation problem – and ultimately lead to increased innovation performance.