Running a small business is not easy, especially when the small business is just starting out. Any misstep, even well-intentioned, can cause a serious setback. But have no fear! There’s a whole untapped squad of people out there ready to work for you for free! Here are three ways crowdsourcing is good for small businesses.
Corporations tend to focus on fads, often packaged into corporate initiatives or programs, that roll in and out of favor over time. Attention from leadership around any single initiative doesn’t last forever, and it will shift to the next bright and shiny object at some point. How do you prepare for when this happens?
Many successful innovation programs are extending their offerings to include training efforts for employees around the skills of innovation. This whitepaper (the first in a series of four) examines the benefits of such an approach for companies, innovation program leaders, and the employees who participate.
Part ten of the series finds challenge team members Ivete Monte and Carlos Suerte comparing notes. How has the first collaborative innovation challenge from the Idea Mill Program been received in their respective regions? What reservations does each have?
You would be hard-pressed to find a business leader who would question the importance of innovation not only to promote growth within their organization, but also to ensure its very survival. These business leaders have invested significantly in their innovation initiatives to support this importance. Yet a 2012 Accenture study found that more than half of corporate executives were disappointed by their innovation results and returns from their innovation investments.
Over the last 5 years, Open Innovation has been evolving quite a lot in the ways it can be defined and implemented. Rather than proposing one more definition or describe one specific way to approach it, here is a set of trends I foresee based on the numbers of projects I have been involved in and the evolution of needs from organizations, would they be major corporations, SMEs or Public Services.
In its latest Global Innovation Excellence Study Arthur D. Little provides hard evidence on which innovation practices separate top innovators from others within and across a wide range of industries. The study zooms in on the relationship between innovation success - based on impact of innovation - and innovation performance - based on a comprehensive framework which breaks down innovation activity into different areas and looks at adoption of best practices in each – and is available as an online toolkit. The toolkit is readily accessible and provides valuable feedback on innovation performance as measured against peers, including opportunities for improvement.
Practicing collaborative innovation takes time, money, and attention. Organizational leaders ask practitioners to “show me the ROI.” How does the practice benefit the organization? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores how engagement serves as the return on the front end of the practice—and why engagement matters.
Design empowered innovation combines the best of right and left brain thinking. It has the capacity to deliver better ideas, with more relevance, realized earlier. By focusing on individuals, moments and journeys in ethnography, insights become deeper. By embracing chaos and play in brainstorms, creative teams can explore further. By iterating and early prototyping, ideas become real and develop more rapidly.
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.
Innovation is so important that most senior executives say that it’s integral to their company’s success. Because companies invest so much in it, getting a return is critical. Poor measurement practices result in bad or incomplete information, wasted resources, and a lower return on innovation investments. InnovationManagemenet asked James Andrew, senior partner of BCG and coauthor of the senior management survey Measuring Innovation 2009 a few questions about the importance of measuring your innovation efforts.
Today’s business leaders view innovation as a means to fight the financial crisis, however a new European study by INSEAD and Logica warns that the link between the money spent and the final result is broken. Their findings show that the majority of business leaders commit substantial resources to innovation, but only nine percent use ROI as a measure of innovation. What’s more, the Nordic countries achieved the lowest rating when it comes to measuring and implementing innovation.
Collaboration is the new hot thing. The idea is not new and one can trace its origins from the Silk route, to the old Italian Shipping cluster, to the Medicis, to the evolution of different industries, to the new age of globalisation to the new age we see today. However, we live in a business age with hype cycles and buzzwords serving as adrenalins. Everybody is talking collaboration. The new impetus has come because of three main reasons.
According to disruptive innovation theory, companies have the best chance of creating new growth through the introduction of disruptive innovations in the market. But what is it and how can firms be disruptive? And why do they fail to be disruptive? Learn more about disruptive innovation in this article by Gunjan Bhardwaj, head of Ernst & Young´s Global Business Performance Think-tank.
Leading companies in Europe have abandoned their old and more or less closed systems, and are building new eco systems that include collaboration with academies, suppliers and sometimes even competitors to create more value for their customers. These companies are examples of a successfully managed innovation process.
