Innovation ain’t what it was. It was once the province of a department, with a clear remit: new product development. Today, it’s everywhere. It concerns not only products and services, but also processes, technologies, business models, pricing plans, and routes to market, even performance management practices – the whole value chain in fact.
Studies have shown that companies’ return on innovation (ROI) or hit rate is somewhere between 2-10%. That is another way of saying that around 90% of all innovation efforts are never commercialised or used in general. Jørn Bang Andersen, senior advisor to the Nordic Innovation Centre (NICe), presents a NICe case study on possible ways to dramatically change that.
Companies who are engaged in developing innovation processes are also likely to be involved in outsourcing significant aspects of their operations. So how do you innovate when you've also outsourced? Sanjiv Gossain explores the issues.
It's a well known fact that Europe's competitive potential is dependent on the capacity to be truly innovative and creative in launching new successful products and services. This can be a daunting challenge for many organizations, not the least for small and medium sized enterprises that often lack proficiency in innovation management. IMP³rove is an approach developed especially to meet the needs of SMEs to help them develop innovation management performance with sustainable impact.
For any corporate innovation initiative to succeed, it is important that it is aligned with corporate strategy. Jeffrey Baumgartner shares a simple three step approach to help ensure that this happens and to avoid common pitfalls.
Now that you've created that next great thing, how do you convince your customers that it really is as great as you think it is?
With many companies downsizing, rightsizing and reorganizing lately, human resources is about as popular as bird flu these days. But savvy companies have a real opportunity to rethink the role of HR - into the engine that drives the cultural changes needed to achieve sustainable innovation, according to Rowan Gibson.
It is a major challenge for an innovation leader to operate in an environment where the top executives don
You have doubtless visited a hotel or restaurant or other service business where a small box invited you to offer suggestions on "how can we better serve you?" Very likely, you never bothered to make a suggestion because, like most people, you sincerely doubted anything would happen to your suggestion. Indeed, I often wondered if such boxes were ever emptied and suggestions read! In other words, you probably didn't make the effort to offer a suggestion because there seemed to be no purpose to doing so.
The sixth major issue to be tackled by our distinguished panel of innovation practitioners is the all-import issue of metrics: How do you measure innovation results and outcomes and motivate the organization to deliver across all stages of the process, and what are the best metrics for measuring innovation performance?
The discussion about whether or not to do innovation is over. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate that innovation is central to higher margins, higher customer loyalty and long term viability. What leaders now struggle with is how do I do it and how do I measure it?
