Over the years, Israel has accumulated a lot of experience with corporate open innovation. Over 350 global corporations selected Israel as their source for innovation, understanding that the rapid rate that technology changes and the fierce competition that exists, does not allow these companies to rely just on their R&D departments.
Our culture has made it pretty easy to put workaholics on a pedestal. Though almost all American employees earn time off, many fail to take advantage of the time they’ve collected.
Often managers make two distinct and completely opposite sets of mistakes when they’re tasked with managing highly creative employees. By means of their leadership approach, they either don’t acknowledge the uniqueness of their creative employees or they take the recognition too far and essentially create inappropriate expectations and division within their workplace.
Open innovation is widely used in large companies and we know increasingly more about how to manage this process. In contrast, we know virtually nothing about the managers and practitioners who are driving open innovation in large companies. Who are the managers operating in open innovation teams or units? What is their profile? How long do they stay in an open innovation job, and what is their tenure in the company? This report tries to answer these questions based on an investigation of open innovation managers on LinkedIn.
Innovation initiatives have a habit of causing excitement and expectation; the organisation is trying something different and wanting to do new things. Senior management are anticipating the brand new shiny ideas, and front-line employees can’t wait to be rid of their daily frustrations. So what could go wrong? However, in all this excitement, there’s a group that is usually neglected in the engagement strategy – the middle managers. Often it’s assumed that these managers will support all the company initiatives. It’s their role to toe the line and make sure others do. They’ll buy in surely? Actually, they don’t.
Amy Radin became one of America's first Chief Innovation Officers when Citigroup appointed her to the role in 2005. She is currently Chief Innovation officer at E*Trade Financial, the leading online discount stock brokerage. Amy talks to Innovation Management about what it takes to be a head up on innovation in a major corporation.
What role does the C-Suite have in exercising the company’s innovation governance responsibilities? In this article, the last in a series of five, professor Jean-Philippe Deschamps, defines six domains that are essential to organize and mobilize for innovation. They will condition the way innovation will be carried out and sustained by the organization and hence belong to the prime innovation governance duties of the top management team.
Today we're adding a breath of inspiration to the whirlwind of information about how innovation should be managed in the organization. Caspar van Rijnbach provides twelve suggestions of what an innovative leader should be. Do you have more to contribute?
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
For years, management and business schools have vastly exaggerated the importance of tools and theories in delivering innovations to the markets effectively. As common sense indicates, the overwhelmingly important predictor of success for an innovation is not the use of tools, “innovation frameworks”, or handbook of rules, but the quality of leadership of the project and the talent and motivation of the staff carrying it out. In innovation management, we need to go back to basics.
Innovation doesn’t have to be a mystery. It can be organized and managed by people who are not, themselves, innovators. But management’s usual command and control tools are not sufficient for this task. Innovation emerges from a system whose behavior is non-linear. For this reason, management tools must be flexible and adaptive.
Who is in control of your innovation process? If it is not management, your process will go nowhere, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner. Sadly, many companies launch half-baked innovation initiatives and hand control over to ill-trained managers, consultants, customers and even the general public.
Innovation management is a formative discipline and innovation managers have had their hands full with ideas management, design thinking, service innovation and many more new ideas. But sustainable innovation should be a key tool in any innovation manager's skill-set, argues Chris Sherwin, sustainability expert at Forum for the Future.
The European Union's 'Innovation Union' initiative signals a change in how we think about innovation and the relationship between innovation, research and product or service development. In this four part series exploring the implications of the EU initiative, Haydn Shaughnessy begins by asking one of its architects, EU head of Innovation Policy, Reinhard Buescher what it means for innovation managers.
