If you’re reading this, then you probably know the feeling - You’ve reached a certain point in your company’s growth where everything is looking good: you have the right people, the right product, and everyone is happy. Then, you realize that this comfort isn’t going to last forever. Scaling up is a scary step, because it’s easy to be too ambitious and undermine the progress you’ve already made.
The importance of innovation for organizations to remain competitive is widely discussed and well accepted by scholars and practicing managers. However, failures in innovation attempts are quite common and raise many questions. Why do firms with innovative products fail? Does market acceptance of innovations alone guarantee continuous success? Is it innovation strategy that can ensure long-term prosperity? One can argue that it is not only how to innovate that matters, but also where, what and when to innovate that make the difference.
Are we still stuck in the innovation processes of the last century? On this week’s episode, Alexander Osterwalder looks at some of the fundamental problems in industries such as banking or pharmaceuticals and why the value propositions of today are not very satisfying for customers. Alex explains why the time has come to create new organizational structures and add a space where new business models and new value propositions can thrive.
In a field centered around fresh, outside-the-box thinking, it is no wonder that there is such a broad range of definitions for the term innovation. Creating a clear-cut definition for the term is critical in shaping the culture of innovation at your organization and will help you determine which resources to allocate to your program.
Given the difficulties in developing and working with metrics and measures for open innovation and ecosystems, I have pulled together some inspiration and insights from several articles.
Take a quick glance around your office. What do you see? Categorically “Start-up” types in t-shirts and jeans passing bottles of craft beer around? Or “Suits”, with their collars starched to perfection, hunched over their laptops and scrambling away at emails? What would happen if we flipped these scenarios around? I for one, would love to see my accountant rock up to work in a Hawaiian Shirt; a calculator in one hand, and a piña colada in the other. But what difference would this make?
All successful companies must eventually answer the same basic question: How do you establish new growth strategies and business opportunities from within your organization? The new book, The Art of Opportunity was written to help your business answer that question. The concepts were cultivated through more than 20 years of academic research and experience, providing organizations with a detailed blueprint for how to grow, innovate, and transform.
Innovation leaders today don’t have an easy job. Tasked with bringing Innovation to their organization, they often face a variety of interpretations of innovation throughout the organization, a lack of comprehensive understanding of what innovation really entails, and what it requires to truly embed innovation in a way that it sustains itself.
You can’t go an entire commercial break during the World Cup or a State of the Union address without hearing the word innovation pop up at least once or twice. Companies have added innovation to their company values and mission statements in accelerating numbers.
As innovation practitioners, few of us would refute that decision-making is one of the biggest progress-halting problems in corporations pursuing innovation as a continuous process. This article introduces a hands-on tool to help innovators, management members and corporate boards to follow a visual, utterly practical method to “consider” (as opposed to evaluate) new projects and their possible implications in their companies’ future. The tool in turn, fosters lean communication and inclusive understanding among diverse participants, claiming that, by following its structure, innovation is not only possible, but repeatable.
Though companies invest into innovation they like results less and less. There seems to be a glass ceiling for driving innovation, which neither new tools and processes nor innovation consultants seem to crack. It is time to face the elephant in the room: company culture and its impact on innovation performance. Top management needs to learn deal with it. Then company culture will become a driver of innovation rather than getting in the way.
Maintaining and building high-quality engagement over time should be the focus of all innovation managers as they strive to develop sustainable enterprise programs. This article shares key activities you can undertake in order to boost engagement with your program.
Enterprise innovation has one main goal – developing business value. There are many different elements that support that goal, but one of the most crucial is communications. As mentioned in the previous article in this series, software has a key role to play, but it doesn’t guarantee employee participation or value to the business, we need to think more widely to address these needs.
Over the past six years The World Database of Innovation initiative has uncovered the world’s first statistics behind the practices that allow large organizations to grow and to innovate. In collaboration with innovation leaders and other experts Uri Neren and his team found 27 management structures, processes, and cultural practices are shared by the world’s fastest growing companies that make what could be called an “Innovation Management Equation.”
Companies become increasingly restrictive in their consulting spending, especially during times of economic crisis, where the return on the investments on consulting services is questioned and carefully considered. Consulting in the area of innovation management is even more under pressure as it is usually much lower on the CEOs’ agenda than e.g. restructuring or general cost-cutting. Therefore, innovation management consultants face the challenge to develop their client base, be effective by providing the right recommendations and be efficient by developing these recommendations in as short a period of time as possible. Mastering such a challenge seems like searching for Columbus’ Egg in innovation management consulting.
