Why Your Innovation Process is a Recipe for Failure

Having a process for the front end of innovation is necessary but not sufficient. It also requires proper levels of funding, and a governance structure to support it. In this article, we'll look at how these aspects tie together, and how your company can support your full innovation lifecycle.

Executing on Innovation – The Required Key Ingredients

Innovation: We all have seen the biggest, most successful companies talk about it and share their success stories. We have read about it in the latest business journals and magazines. We all want it in our organization but the right recipe with the right ingredients is often elusive. In this article we will share different views and discuss key ingredients required to create, execute, and innovate in your organization.

Are You Focusing on the Right Pilot?

Piloting in business innovation means testing an idea effectively. This is not a straightforward process and requires addressing the right questions: What idea should we test? Which aspect of it? How should we go about testing? How should we measure the results? What do we allow these results to mean and what do we do afterwards?

Taking Action: Your Innovation Master Plan

The focus of the The Innovation Formula is on the innovation process that makes sense for small businesses, where lean, simple, and fast are essential. You may also be interested in a view of the innovation process that’s suited to larger companies, so this chapter provides an overview of the Innovation Master Plan framework that we use when we’re working with larger organizations on innovation projects and initiatives.

Designing Your Innovation Portfolio

The process of designing and developing your own innovation portfolios occurs as a series of steps that are described in a sequence because the output of one step will help you to think about the subsequent ones. The process builds towards design conclusions and decisions about the choices you’ll have to make, and then the investments that will back them up. In this chapter excerpt, Langdon Morris walks us through the process.

Managing Risk with Your Innovation Portfolio

Probably the single greatest threat to most small businesses is “concentration risk,” also known as “keeping all your eggs in one basket.” In this chapter excerpt of of The Innovation Formula Langdon Morris discusses innovation portfolio design, and how it translates the goals and intents of your aims and strategy into a set of risk-managed innovation projects.

Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity

Charles Darwin said it quite well: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Innovation, collaboration, and improvisation are indeed essential forces shaping all of business and all of modern life, and they’ve become vitally important for the individual, the organization, and indeed for all of society.

Elements of a Successful Innovation Roadmap

Countless articles argue: To remain competitive, companies need to consistently build their innovation portfolio. Value-oriented improvement and new developments must permeate the business. This article discusses a structured approach, known as a Rapid Innovation Cycle, which brings a repeatable process to innovation, empowering individuals to contribute more and organizations to look beyond themselves—all leading to a higher success rate.

Bold Innovation in Mature Markets: The Five Vectors

Doing more of the same old product improvements, extensions and modifications – product renovation – won’t deliver the sales and profit impact needed to grow the business. To the great majority of businesses, product development means line extensions, improvements and product modifications and only serves to maintain market share. Firms increasingly compete for a piece of a shrinking pie by introducing one insignificant new product after another. The launch of a truly differentiated new product in mature markets is rare these days.

Lessons from Public-Private Innovation Strategic Alliances for SMEs

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.

Managing Innovation Portfolios – Operational Portfolio Management

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.

PharmaX, the CEO’s Dilemma and Open Innovation – Part 2

In the first installment, Gordon the newly appointed CEO at Pharmax is confronted with an innovation gap of 5 years. Certainly, the potential of the portfolio is high, but the risks are even higher. With market pressure breathing down his neck, Gordon tries to make sense of the options that he has and make the right decisions.

Managing Innovation Portfolios – Strategic Portfolio Management

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.

How to Innovate: The Innovation Process

Many people assume that creating new ideas is the beginning of the innovation process, but actually that’s not true. Ideation occurs in the middle of the disciplined innovation process, which we present in this chapter.

Collaborative Innovation Inside & Beyond the Firm – Two Worlds Become One

This year, a very interesting trend in collaborative innovation can be observed in Central Europe: The once distinct concepts of “Enterprise 2.0” and “Open Innovation” are merging. Firms are taking a holistic view on collaborative innovation and put the question about whether collaborative innovation should happen primarily within the firm’s walls or with externals out of the focus.