In times of severe recession should you cut costs and focus on survival or take the opportunity to invest in innovation so that you can benefit from the eventual recovery? Let's have a look at a case study of Kellogg's, which took a leap to invest in a new type of cereal - and that paid off even in the face of extreme adversity.
Nearly every company’s strategy these days is to grow through innovation, yet many fall short. We all know the standard reasons: innovation is hard, innovation is uncertain or innovation grinds against the gears of the operating organization. They are all more or less true, but they are also simplistic, not really guiding executives on how to actually get more innovation.
The latest Innovation Leaders research shows that there is an increasing number of high-growth companies that are prepared to take greater risk and make big bets. Rather than focus just on incremental growth, they are being bolder and are seeking to develop more radical innovation opportunities. Despite requiring significant investment and offering no guarantee of success this approach has been transformational for some. Where and why is this happening and what has changed that has made this approach more common?
Recent advances in technology put Internet-of-things (IoT)-innovation on top of the management agenda across industries. It is predicted to increase economic value by $11.1 trillion in 2025 (McKinsey 2015). The Service Science Factory and Noventum collaborated on this article to present a state-of-the art view on the Internet of Things and how to implement this vision within organizations.
In this in-depth article Haydn Shaughnessy discusses why traditional ROI decision making is becoming irrelevant and how options planning is a key element of competitiveness. In these uncertain times firms need to recognise and analyse their options thoroughly in order to be ready for inevitable change.
Too many notes, Mozart was once told. Too many ideas, we might say today. The culture of innovation is awash with idea generation and its sidekick, fail-fast fail cheap innovation. Worse, we need a culture of transformation not just innovation. Accenture recently reported that 81% of executives they interviewed see platforms as central to their strategy over the next three years.
Innovation and organizational learning are inextricably connected. A company must learn from its mistakes and cultivate multiple pathways for recognizing and leveraging the best ideas effectively, whether those ideas come from inside or outside of the organization, says Jim Clemmer. Here are 35 ways to sharpen your organizational "innovation radar," to accelerate learning cycles and recognize and capitalize on opportunities faster.
Interpersonal networks within organizations have a huge influence on how successfully firms can generate and execute new ideas, says innovation professor Tim Kastelle.
Before the radical shifts in technology disrupt the industry fabric, there exists a great potential to appropriate value from the market through incremental product and business model innovations. The less intense the competition, less matured the market - larger is the potential. The emerging markets of the world the BRICs (where s could stand for the plurality as well as South Africa), have long been projected as the markets to invest in.
The indulgent reader of my columns has already met the concepts of mesovation and exovation, and now I’m going to introduce yet another neologism: metovation. Meto- in metovation stems from the prefix meta- where I for easier pronunciation exchanged o for a. Meta is of Greek language origin and stands for the next higher level of abstraction.
Open innovation has been hyped in the media and by some consulting firms over the past few years as the next new thing and is just giving a term to an activity that has been underway in business for a long time. Simply put, open innovation is partnering to gain leverage and build barriers to competition.
In the Chinese word for crisis ‘weiji’ (??), ‘wei’ ? means danger, and ‘ji’ ? means opportunity. Crisis does not have the same meaning in China as in Western society. Chinese people believe that danger can be turned into opportunity, if one acts wisely according to under the circumstances. This mentality can be clearly seen in the way that China has tackled the global financial crisis.
One of the most prevalent and dangerous misconceptions in innovation [...]
What creative lessons can you learn from one of the most compelling stories ever told? Plenty!
For companies desiring organic growth and whose innovation efforts are not yielding the results demanded, using a Strategic Innovation approach using structured tools and methods will produce higher value products, services, systems, and environments that will resonate deeper with people to encourage them to become loyal customers. This approach delivers better solutions that are feasible to build, viable for profit, and desirable to the user.
