There are plenty of examples of innovation program failure at large organizations. In this article, I examine the key markers that I have observed, that indicate a program may be in trouble and at risk of failure.
While most companies focus their innovation efforts on new products, others like Amazon and Netflix are disrupting industries with business model innovation --a cheaper, easier and more powerful form of innovation. InnovationManagement.se spoke about business model innovation with professors Netessine and Girotra, authors of the new book “The risk-driven business model”
Pulling the plug on an in-flight project is hard. No one wants to be the person calling it quits, offending team members and admitting defeat. It is this mentality, however, that ends up sucking the life out of resources and budgets and setting the organization up for continued failure because the process is broken. How can you ensure only the right projects survive, wrong ones are killed early and lessons are celebrated after an appropriate mourning period? It’s going to take courage.
Organizations increasingly seek new forms of innovation—and, for themselves, transformation—by engaging in co-creation with the suppliers, clients, and consumers that comprise their value streams. What insights might be gained from organizations that have begun to realize their potential for leadership by embracing openness as a core element of their charter? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on the progress that the Beijing Genomics Institute (B.G.I.) has made on this front. What lessons does B.G.I. have to teach organizations that decide to paddle with the Digital Age currents as opposed to against them?
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.
When starting innovation, a lot of the same mistakes are made over and over again. Here is how you can recognize and avoid them.
InnovationManagement is delighted to present a brand new Case Study highlighting the challenges of creating an innovation culture that: supports new product/service development initiatives, facilitates the creation of idea campaigns, spurs employee engagement and develops business value. In this article, Colin Nelson, Director of Strategic Consulting at HYPE Innovation, delves deeper into how collaborative innovation challenges were identified, managed and successfully overcome at Swisslog.
While the previous two methods – Netnography and Social Media Solution Scouting – outline the potential of passive methods in using the power of social media for innovation, the next two approaches enable companies to interact with consumers. Configuration Tools as well as Innovation Contests invite users outside the company’s four walls to become an active part of new product development. In part two of this article you will learn how Audi and Henkel empowered the crowd and turned them into co-producers.
Open innovation has found its way into companies’ innovation processes and is a widely used approach to spur collaborative innovation with consumers. A multitude of methods and tools have come into being, creating confusion about how to make the most out of users’ knowledge and creativity. This article provides innovation managers with insights into four popular open innovation practices at four German blue chips and contrasts the various approaches.
Reaching the highest point of the Earth is one of the greatest expeditions of mankind. It made Edmund Hillary famous. After reading Hillary’s ‘View from the Summit’ Gijs van Wulfen shares ten innovation lessons on being 1st.
Just because you can create a crowdfunding campaign for your next Big Idea doesn't mean you should, as book author Glenn Fleishman recently discovered.
Customers change. Competitors change. Technology changes. If you don’t do anything, new and competitive products catch up and overtake your products and services quickly. A study by A.D. Little has shown that the life cycle of products has decreased by factor 4 the last fifty years. So innovation is essential. But it is time consuming. It demands a lot of resources. And a positive outcome is very uncertain. In this blog Gijs van Wulfen offers a helping hand by identifying five common mistakes to avoid.
The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen. It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity. Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity. In this article Paul Sloane takes a look at what lessons to be learned from the failure.
It is often in the commencement of one’s career that simple mistakes are made. Whether it’s a result of inexperience, blinding enthusiasm or fearlessness doesn’t really matter, as long as the lesson learned serves you, and others, well. Gijs van Wulfen shares a constructive experience from his first innovation position.
Michael Fruhling doesn't like open innovation portals, in general. What's his problem with them?
