SWICH – The Six Week Innovation Challenge

The Six Week Innovation Challenge is becoming the method of choice in corporates. And it's not only innovators who love the sprint - leaders embrace it just as much.

How is Crowdsourcing Uniquely Beneficial to Technologists

Innovation proves vital for companies across industries, but carries key importance in the technology field. Mainstream perception of the tech industry conjures illustrations of cutting edge, never-before-seen products poised to disrupt and revolutionize daily lives.

Navigating the Make versus Buy Decision: A Crowd Sourced Check List

Product managers facing the make versus buy decision for their organization have a lot to consider. Biases abound. In this article, the innovation architect Doug Collins shares what was on the minds of senior product management leaders on this topic when they convened, recently. Their top 10 factors follow below.

Applying Collaborative Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing: an Example of Lean

Achieving authentic transformation across the manufacturing enterprise can seem as challenging as playing a competitive game of Jenga® in woolen mittens. In this article the innovation architect Doug Collins explores the role that collaborative innovation can play in realizing meaningful change. He grounds the exploration with an example from lean.

Results of a study on excellence in the Fuzzy Front-End (PART 2): Where leading firms are setting their priorities

This is the second part of a 2-part series on a study that innovation.support conducted. In the study we wanted to find out where leading firms from various industry sectors set their priorities in developing the early phase of their innovation funnels (“Fuzzy Front-End”). In this article we want to provide you with the key findings of our study.

How to Achieve Excellence in the Fuzzy Front-End – Part 1

The term “Fuzzy Front-End” (FFE) has been established for the early stage of innovation which determines the innovation effectiveness and hence ultimately innovation success. We wanted to better understand where leading firms are setting their priorities in the FFE currently and where they see things going in the future. To answer this, we conducted a study. Our train of thought and the main findings are in a two-part article series published here.

Overcommitting and Underutilizing Resources is Risky Business

Bringing innovative products, methods, and ideas to market requires companies to apply resources to their most promising concepts and that can be expensive, requiring lots of talent, if they want to be fast and first to market. The problem is that most companies overcommit their limited resources by approving more ideas than they execute. They do it because they lack a clear view into their resource capacity.

Mind the Gap! 5 Tips on How to Align Your Boss’ Perception of Innovation Maturity with Reality

The Fourth Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study identified challenges organizations face in speeding innovation to bring products to market. The biggest disconnect appears between middle management and executives as to where the organization is with their innovation maturity. Bridging this gap may be the most important thing you do to improve ROI.

Improving Time to Innovation: Process is Not the Enemy

While most companies see innovation as a competitive advantage, the ability to take an idea from concept to delivery is truly what sets one company apart from another. Achieving this level of operational efficiency is not a simple feat and without processes around resource management and capacity planning, it is unlikely to succeed. The fact is, no matter how brilliant or timely an idea, if the right resources are not available to work on it, the idea simply remains an idea.

7 Tips to Speed Time to Innovation

This article delves into the goals every organization should work toward to boost product development performance, looks at how these goals further a product organizations ability to bring innovative products to market, and outlines the ways that a Product Portfolio Management (PPM) Solution helps companies reach these goals.

The Bouillon Soup Lesson: You Cannot Innovate Alone

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.

Preparing for Tomorrow’s Innovations today

Being the General Manager of TomorrowLab, Steven Peleman knows what is important for the creation of innovation in companies and organizations. Bringing people together outside their companies and helping them to develop new views of their existing innovation organization make a good start. Getting them to take more chances is even better.