Innovation
ARTICLES

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The Case for Open Innovation in Agriculture

Oct-27-16. By Joseph Byrum

Open innovation is reshaping the agricultural landscape. More than in other industries, agriculture has found the need to play technological catch-up. Advances in highly technical systems that use drones, sensors, and data analytics have created a demand for expertise not traditionally associated with ag. Consequently, most of the agricultural companies that are not currently taking advantage of open innovation will be doing so by the decade’s end. The rest may not be around much longer.

Innovating the Minimum Viable Experience

Oct-25-16. By Paul Hobcraft, Jeffrey Phillips

Incremental, discrete product innovation will not create significant new revenues or disrupt markets. The reasons include the growing expectation of seamless experiences from the consumers’ viewpoint and the rising importance of platforms and ecosystems in which new products or services exist.

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned about Multi-sided Markets (Platforms)

Oct-22-16. By Tren Griffin

Why don’t firms create more multi-sided markets if they are so profitable? Because getting all of the elements just right at just the right time is very hard to do successfully. Creating a successful multi-sided market requires a lot of skill and luck as will be explained below.

Want to Hire Innovators? Here's How You're Dismissing Them

Oct-20-16. By Jorge Barba

Most organizations are not setup to hire innovators, rather they filter them out. Why? Because they follow the tried and true solid advice for making good hiring decisions: hire for culture-fit.

Managing Multiparty Innovation

Oct-18-16. By Nathan Furr, Kate O’Keeffe, Jeffrey H. Dyer

In an increasingly digital and connected environment, leaders of established companies frequently find themselves facing opportunities that they—or even their industries—cannot seize alone. Instead of relying on start-ups to create innovations and then buying in to them, organizations taking part in this new process, which we call "ecosystem innovation," collaborate to develop and then commercialize new concepts.

How to Make Your First IoT Product a Great One

Oct-17-16. By Tony Scherba

While there's reason to be excited about Fit Driver and today’s other IoT products, be careful not to mistake hype for traction. Because creating a valuable product is so difficult, somewhere between 25 and 45 percent of all products fail.

How to Help Teams Develop a More Innovative Mindset

Oct-17-16. By Anita Bruzzese

Just delaying the start of your work or getting bored isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to pop up with an idea that will rival the invention of the telegraph or the iPhone. So what is it that fuels some individuals and organizations to be so innovative? Why does it seem some people get an extra helping of creativity or some companies can churn out innovative ideas seemingly every week?

Four Ways the Next US President can Foster an Innovation Economy

Oct-06-16. By Bill Gates

As the US presidential candidates lay out competing visions for the country, I have been thinking about a topic they have not yet discussed in detail: what political leadership can do to accelerate innovation. Innovation is the reason our lives have improved over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better. Today, we are far more productive because of the IT revolution. The most successful economies are driven by innovative industries that evolve to meet the needs of a changing world.

The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators

Oct-03-16. By Paul Hobcraft

Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

The Transformative Business Model

Oct-01-16. By Stelios Kavadias, Kostas Ladas, Christoph Loch

We usually associate an industry’s transformation with the adoption of a new technology. But although new technologies are often major factors, they have never transformed an industry on their own. What does achieve such a transformation is a business model that can link a new technology to an emerging market need.

Incorporating the Law of Patience into Your Innovation Culture

Sep-29-16. By Phil McKinney

We’ve seen that, all too often, people in business equate patience with negligence. In their minds, patience is the opposite of what’s needed to make big things happen. They expect innovation and progress to happen on schedule. But as Leo Tolstoy explained long ago, patience in innovation does not mean doing nothing. All it means is giving your team the time they need to produce results—and sometimes that means giving them a lot of time.

Make Awesome Where Awesome is Not

Sep-26-16. By Jorge Barba

Every assumption is an innovation opportunity. The assumption that only a few of us is brave, creative and bold needs to be killed for everyone to make an impact in the Next Economy, one where most routine jobs will be delegated to algorithms and robots. The only thing we can’t delegate, and shouldn’t, is that what makes us human: creativity.

Innovative Alliances in a connected World

Sep-26-16. By Raphael Briner

The big question is for me: Do we have to innovate with technologies or alliances? So today, I want to talk about accelerated growth factors, customer values, collaboration types, conducive knowledge, and connectivism. Yes, I didn’t say connectivity.

A Roadmap for Building Corporate Innovation Capabilities

Sep-22-16. By Stefan Lindegaard

What should a roadmap that helps you develop corporate innovation capabilities look like? How do you bring new thoughts and approaches together with current and past initiatives (both successes and failures) and turn this into a single framework? How do you keep pushing and developing your organization to become more flexible and agile without losing out on the current overall efforts and expected results?

Patience in Innovation: Success Stories From the Front Lines

Sep-16-16. By Phil McKinney

In a world of on-demand everything and overnight shipping, we’ve all but forgotten what it means to be patient. We’re so used to having the world at our fingertips that it’s hard to imagine, or even tolerate, waiting very long for anything. And unfortunately, we don’t check this attitude at the door when we walk into the office; most people don’t look at innovation and think, “Let’s just give this some time.” Like our Amazon packages and Netflix shows, we want them fast. We want innovation right now.

6 Things Every Organization Needs to Innovate

Sep-16-16. By Greg Satell

Take a look at any successful enterprise and you’ll find innovation at its core. That was just as true a hundred years ago when Henry Ford perfected the assembly line as it is today, when modern day giants like Elon Musk bring cutting edge technology to market. Innovation, as I’ve written before, is how people come up with novel solutions to important problems.

Why AR and IoT are set to Change Our World as We Know It

Sep-16-16. By Charlie Mayes

How many technological innovations have resulted in similarly drastic change or complete social evolution which was not envisaged at the outset. To name just a few: my grandparents’ generation saw the introduction of the telephone, my parents’ the television, more recently computing and the internet and now, in a time of ever accelerating change, smart phones and all things social. In each case, society was not prepared, for the impact of each of these advances as their applications evolved in unforeseen directions following their introduction.

How to Use A.C.E. to Improve the Quality of Your Ideas

Sep-16-16. By Michael Plishka

Name at least 10 ways to use a brick. Take a couple minutes and write them down. Odds are, the first few ideas on your list are the same as mine. You also probably had a tough time getting past the first four or five, right? That’s actually totally normal. The first ideas are the ones that everyone has. The next ones are the ones that are the money-makers, the ideas others didn’t think of. So, how do you get past the first few ‘meh’ ideas and get to the good ones?

Learn from the Best: Google’s 9 Principles of Innovation (Part 2 of 2)

Sep-13-16. By Robert Brands

Ship and iterate. This innovation principle is the updated version of former Google executive Marissa Mayer’s 2008 “innovation, not instant perfection” innovation principle.[1] “Ship and iterate” means to ship your products out to market early and often rather than waiting until they are absolutely perfect to take them to market.

Overcome Resistance to Change by Enlisting the Right People

Sep-13-16. By Todd Warner

The secret to changing an organization is to understand the fundamental units that make up the social system — these local tribes — and to invert the change process so that tribes own the change. To influence tribes in organizations, you have to give up control, and recognize that every change always goes through a process of localization as it gets executed.

So How do you Manage Exploiting and Exploring for Innovation?

Sep-07-16. By Paul Hobcraft

In this post I wanted to explain my thinking through on this ability to be ‘ambidextrous’, knowing the difference of when to exploit and when to explore as essential to leveraging innovation, in all its forms and watching out for some of the traps in not managing this well.

A Message for Future MBAs: Innovation Comes From Exploration

Sep-05-16. By Jorge Barba

Where fear runs rampant, innovation dies. Fear is mediocrity’s friend. It’s why most businesses rarely create new business models, they’re simply too afraid to try anything new because failure is not an option. To fail is to get fired. But, the bottom line is failure is a prerequisite for innovation, they go hand in hand.

Making a Compelling Business Case for an Integated Innovation Framework

Sep-01-16. By Paul Hobcraft

An increased focus on innovation as a consistent discipline requires significant reflection on what needs changing, what impact this change will have and how do we proceed to implement it. This requires senior management attention because of the significant organisational impact.

Removing Barriers for Idea Submission: The Submission Process

Aug-31-16. By Steve Telio

Innovation Programs often fall victim to a series of unknowns and barriers resulting from gaps in the program itself. With this as a backdrop, it is important remember that how you set up your innovation program may mitigate some, but not all, of the barriers. Idea submission can be hindered by personal barriers. Potential idea submission can be prevented because of the lack of awareness that anyone is seeking a particular type of idea or the fear that they may lose ownership of their idea.

Innovation: Management versus Enablement

Aug-29-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

We managers and executives, trained in the school of efficiency and with our MBAs in tow believe we can "manage" anything. In to some degree that is correct. We can manage and improve things that are well defined and understood. But the risk we run when we talk about managing innovation, is that we become entranced with the idea of "managing" and not with the idea of "innovation".

3 Steps to Making Innovation a Habit

Aug-29-16. By Walter Chen

In our "move fast and break things" world, we forget that the big innovations like Facebook and iPhones aren't flash-in-the-pan moments of genius. They take a lot of testing, making mistakes, and re-calibrating. It took nearly a decade for Gmail to go from its first versions to its final launch in 2004. And now we can't imagine sending email without it.

The Big Mistake: Failing to Support Innovation With Proper Resources

Aug-25-16. By Phil McKinney

If you want to build a company that is a leader of innovation, creativity, and change within your industry, you need to have the proper resources to power it. Money, people, equipment, and time are all critical parts of the innovation cycle. Without them, you will never learn what your business is capable of doing: creating sweeping changes across your industry, making your business flow more smoothly, or simply offering advantages to your customers that you never dreamed possible.

How to Increase Innovation in the Workplace

Aug-23-16. By Matias Rodsevich

Today one of the key challenges most companies face is being able to scale rapidly while still keeping their innovative startup edge. Startups have less decision-makers making it easier to take the risks needed to remain as innovative as possible. As these companies start to grow, they often experience a downturn in innovation as management layers increase. In fact, many larger corporations are now attempting to harvest the success of startups by creating small internal companies. This begs the question do you have to stay small to be innovative?

Why R&D Spending is Not a Measure of Innovation

Aug-21-16. By Tendayi Viki

When it comes to R&D spending, corporate leaders often want to know what others are doing. How much are other companies in different industries spending on R&D? Leaders want to know the level of spending in absolute terms (i.e. total expenditure), and also as a percentage of revenue. The presumption is that R&D spending is somehow connected to increased innovation, revenue growth and profits.

What Innovation Resources are Needed to Thrive?

Aug-11-16. By Phil McKinney

In order to achieve this innovation—to start creating ideas, processes, services, and products that are forward-thinking and unique—companies need to make permanent allocations of money, people, time, and equipment that are dedicated to the sole mission of innovating.

The Five Myths of Innovation

Aug-11-16. By Jorge Barba

Innovation isn’t easy, and there are all types of myths on how to make it work and not make it work. In this webinar, Professor Julian Birkinshaw talks about his research on the myths and realities of innovation in large organizations.

Solving Useful Problems: Innovation at Work

Aug-10-16. By Travis Barker

Identifying which problems to solve is open to your business’ core competencies, industry, and values. The ability to identify problems worth solving can thus be used to differentiate essential business product or services versus those that are nice to have. The difference between these two can be substantial as the former category is arguably more sustainable and has the potential to have a larger impact in the customer’s life.

The Growing Value in that Crowd - Encourage it Out

Aug-09-16. By Paul Hobcraft

Crowdsourcing does offer increasing value as a contributor into our innovation management system. It can open up a real rich potential of tapping into diverse opinions that were difficult to reach in the past. Yet it does, from my perspective, need thoughtfully working through in its application and the expected end results, as each will challenge the initial assumptions and that is exactly what you will be looking for, challenging the accepted knowns and revealing the many unknowns.

Innovation Myths Debunked: Part II

Aug-09-16. By Peter Brooke

Today’s business world is buzzing with talk about innovators and innovation. While it’s a good thing that innovation is on the forefront of people’s minds, popular thinking about innovation and the culture of innovation in business is often substantially misguided. There are widespread myths about innovation and innovators that lead to significant misconceptions and can ultimately even hinder or destroy the innovation process.

How to Optimize Your Team for Productivity

Aug-05-16. By May Chau

As a manager, the ultimate goal is to build trust within a team and facilitate higher levels productivity. But how do we go about optimizing our teams for maximum productivity? In Margaret Heffernan’s TED talk Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work, she argues that social cohesion is what builds the greatest teams. She demonstrates the issue of companies running “the superchicken model” that essentially means encouraging competition and only rewarding top performers:

Innovation Myths Debunked: Part I

Aug-02-16. By Peter Brooke

But for all the buzz-worthy chitchat and media and corporate attention given to innovation, there is nevertheless a massive amount of misinformation concerning innovation—as if innovation is a secret society shrouded in mystery and only accessible to the elite or those lucky enough to be in the know. This has led to the perpetuation of many popular myths about innovators and innovation. Not only are these myths leading to the spread of false information but also these myths are slowing down innovation and holding back would-be innovators and innovation in business.

How to Unleash Sustainable Innovation that Matters

Jul-25-16. By Jay Friedlander

Here are some of the fifteen tactics that industry leaders, Nobel Laureates, and disruptive upstarts have used to build mutual prosperity for shareholders, the planet and the local community. Most of these efforts are less than ten years old, yet have resulted in millions, even billions of dollars in savings and sales across industries around the world.

Four Ways to Make Your Business Embrace Innovation

Jul-25-16. By Mark Samuels

How does the IT organisation go from managing tech to building the next big thing? At the recent TCS Innovation Forum in London, speakers suggested four best practice lessons for C-suite executives looking to respond quickly and effectively to the demand for creativity

How to Protect Your Business from Creative Disruption

Jul-23-16. By Ira Kalb

Depending on the year you start counting, the lifespan of a Fortune 500 company has gone from 75 years to just 15. In our fast-moving ever-changing world, new technologies and products are disrupting businesses and entire industries at an accelerating rate.

Futures Thinking is an Essential 21st Century Skill: We Need to Cultivate it Widely

Jul-19-16. By Jorge Barba

What do we mean when we say we must innovate or die. Do we say that to sound smart and interesting? Do we say it to jump on the bandwagon? How about a sense of urgency because we actually believe that there is a better way? Yes, we need to innovate. But based on an obsession with betterment, not with selling more stuff to people.

Fundamentals of Sustaining Innovation in Your Business

Jul-19-16. By Peter Brooke

Every business needs to keep an eye on the market to stay ahead of the competition. One of the easiest ways to do this is to encourage a culture of sustain innovation amongst employees. Whether a business is big or small, everyone can innovate at some level as long as the staff is allowed time to do so. Take a look at some of these best practices to sustain innovation to determine which ones to put in place right away.

Fundamentals of Sustaining Innovation in Your Business

Jul-19-16. By Frank Laughlin

Every business needs to keep an eye on the market to stay ahead of the competition. One of the easiest ways to do this is to encourage a culture of sustain innovation amongst employees. Whether a business is big or small, everyone can innovate at some level as long as the staff is allowed time to do so. Take a look at some of these best practices to sustain innovation to determine which ones to put in place right away.

Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations

Jul-18-16. By Paul Hobcraft

Large organisations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups, not just coming up with original ideas to solve existing problems and pent-up needs, but seeing the work as potentially disruptive to those managing in the existing space. This start-up and entrepreneurial spirit are making many senior executives nervous and they want to find ways to harness this within their own organisations, and thus the intrapreneurial movement has been born and is growing fast.

5 Ways to Inspire Innovation in Your Company

Jul-08-16. By Niraj Ranjan Rout

Everyone’s on a quest to do something new, disrupt the status quo. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to be a bystander and watch things change, or are you going to be the one to lead the change?

Ten Simple Ways to Establish a User Friendly Ideation Process

Jul-01-16. By Mitch Ditkoff

Let's assume for a moment that you and your company value BIG IDEAS -- the kind of ideas that have the potential to change the game, differentiate you from the competition. That's the good news. The not-so-good-news is that the appearance of these BIG IDEAS are not only random, but too often subject to implosion, sabotage, neglect, rabbit holes, premature evaluation, pissing contests, blame, turf wars, and countless other forms of interpersonal and organizational weirdness.

The Promise of Collaboration - Using Social Media in Organizations

Jul-01-16. By Ramkumar Yaragarla

The question that looks intriguing is how a global multinational company spread over many countries, with tens of thousands of employees, maintains meaningful connections, relationships and harnesses collective intelligence. Though it is steep, companies will implement smart collaborative social media technologies to make sure those connections work, along with defining and promoting a global corporate culture.

Digital Innovation Hacks

Jun-27-16. By Mary Mesaglio

The Gartner 2016 CIO Survey of nearly 3,000 CIOs revealed that the least-used digital innovation practices actually correlate to the highest digital return. For example, while agile methodologies receive the bulk of attention from CIOs these days, crowdsourcing will give an organization more bang for its innovative buck.

These 3 Things Make a Company Truly Innovative

Jun-27-16. By Fulvia Montresor

Beyond their geographical and sectorial diversity, these innovative businesses have three crucial aspects in common. They combine innovations, innovate at an ever increasing pace, and work on solutions to global challenges. Here is how they do it.

Future Innovation demands a Different Approach

Jun-23-16. By Paul Hobcraft

We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Stories and Examples of Mass Collaboration

Jun-20-16. By Ramkumar Yaragarla

Whether you are looking to hear and read the story of online collaboration that happened at the Goldcorp Inc. in Canada or the Collaborative distributed computing power that was shared for the SETI@home project, the Search for extraterrestrial intelligence project launched by the University of California, Berkeley, collective intelligence and the “Power of crowds” in online collaboration is here to stay on earth.

6 Key Success Factors for Open Innovation

Jun-18-16. By Merit Morikawa

Open innovation is a trendy buzzword in the business world and there are plenty of sources that underline its importance and fundamentality for the future of businesses. But how does one actually make open innovation work?

Innovation Shifts from Products to Solutions

Jun-15-16. By Barry Jeruzeiski

The world of corporate R&D is undergoing a tectonic shift. Companies are moving away from their traditional, narrow focus on product innovation and into software and services innovation aimed at providing more comprehensive customer experiences. Are you selling smartphones, or are you selling connectivity and a media interface? Are you selling automobiles, or are you selling mobility?

Making Innovation Less Difficult and Less Expensive

Jun-14-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

Too many people in the innovation arena are apt to talk about ideas, which are relatively easy to get, but fail to consider the effort involved to move from an idea stage to an innovation stage. I've often compared this to the amount of force it takes to get a rocket into orbit. You can have thousands of rockets, of all sizes, launching all the time. But until and unless one of them has the requisite amount of thrust necessary to get it into orbit, they will all crash. There's no half way. There's no "almost" in orbital science. You either got into orbit or you crashed and burned. The same is true with innovation.

Finding a Lower-Risk Path to High-Impact Innovations

Jun-13-16. By Joseph V. Sinfield, Freddy Solis

The pursuit of major innovations is often seen as a risky endeavor. However, there is a lower-risk way to commercialize certain types of high-impact innovations — by viewing initial applications as “lily pads” that a company can reach before leaping to the next market.

How Companies Can Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

Jun-10-16. By Michael Tushman

Long-term corporate success is not for the faint of heart. We have spent years examining the reasons companies seem to be strong at short-term execution but too often fail in the long run. We call this the “success syndrome,” and it has become widespread in Corporate America. Simply put, companies succeed in the short term because they create alignment for their initial strategy. To avoid succumbing to the success syndrome, corporate leaders must be ambidextrous.

Crowdsourcing, Share Risk To Increase The Gain

May-31-16. By Evan Shellshear

Successful crowdsourcing is difficult and fraught with problems. To engage a crowd usually requires one to appeal to some­thing else in people other than their desire to earn money. Even when offering compensation, surprisingly, people will often rather volunteer their time than accept a small payment to help others.

Solving the 10 Most Common Innovation Challenges

May-31-16. By Jorge Barba

Solving all of the issues and establishing a well working innovation management system will support the growth of a company and it will create a good customer value and profitability. But they have to develop and improve their system continuously to protect their competitive advantage. Below I elaborate on some of these common innovation challenges and provide some guidance on how to solve them.

The Importance of Leadership in Fostering Organizational Innovation

May-26-16. By Phil McKinney

Any expert on the driving forces behind organizational innovation will tell you that leadership is one of the most important. In fact, I’ve discovered it to be one of the 7 Immutable Laws of Innovation, and a necessity for any institution looking to prioritize leadership.

How Design Thinking Adds Value to Innovation

May-26-16. By Linda Naiman

Successful companies are always looking for new ways to compete in the marketplace. One approach, which has taken the corporate world by storm, is design thinking. Design-led companies such as Apple, Coca Cola, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Whirlpool have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 10 years by an extraordinary 219%, according to a 2014 assessment by the Design Management Institute.

Coaching Helps Overcome the Ten Innovation Intractables

May-24-16. By Paul Hobcraft

So what does block innovation? Arguably there are plenty of things up and down organizations: a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Can You Teach People to Innovate?

May-20-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

Innovators aren't born but they are shaped, more by experience than by training. Of course we can provide some training in any tool or technique, and try to enlarge the way people think when they encounter an innovation exercise. But the best way to make an innovator is to give them an intractable problem and remove the constraining barriers. Encourage them to think differently and come up with novel ideas.

Twelve Principles for Open Innovation 2.0

May-17-16. By Martin Curley

A new mode of innovation is emerging that blurs the lines between universities, industry, governments and communities. It exploits disruptive technologies — such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things and big data — to solve societal challenges sustainably and profitably, and more quickly and ably than before. It is called open innovation 2.0.

The Best Digital Companies Are Set Up to Never Stop Innovating

May-17-16. By Brad Power

Companies born before the internet took hold have an enormous challenge: improving their online products and services at the warp speed of their online competitors. The ability to make thousands of changes a day to its online retail service has been a key reason Amazon is expanding its online lead over Walmart and other historically “bricks and mortar” retailers. Amazon e-commerce revenue growth was 10 times Walmart’s last year in dollar terms, and 1.5 times faster in percentage terms.

Innovation Without Change

May-16-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

I've been puzzling this over the last few weeks, trying to wrap my head around the importance of innovation generally and the lack of real innovation delivery specifically. What I mean is that everyone knows that innovation is vital to growth and future success, but very few new innovations are created. The vast majority of innovation effort and outcome is expended on me-too, so what incremental innovations that don't really change the user or the market.

Resilient Innovation Processes: Improve Under Stress Instead of Breaking

May-12-16. By Phil McKinney

It’s times of stress that really test the strength or weakness of your organization. During stressful times, you learn what the people in your organization are made of—but also whether the systems, functions, and processes you’ve put in place are able to withstand the crises that inevitably come your way. Industry shifts, market downturns, unexpected competitors: when stress comes, it shouldn’t make your organization or process fall to pieces. Instead, stressful times should be when positive discourse, growth, and resiliency thrive.

The Simple Plan for People that Want to Solve Big Problems

May-11-16. By Scott Berkun

If you want to make progress happen, or be someone who brings good ideas into the world, this is for you. It’s the simplest, easiest, most straightforward way to convert your ambition into action. When I’m asked to give advice about managing creativity or how to make an organization “innovative” this is what I share.

3 Ways You Might be Stifling Innovation In Your Organization

May-03-16. By Brad Dewees

In both physical fitness and innovation, bad habits undo the best intentions. A good workout comes to nothing if it’s followed by a super-sized meal on the way home. Likewise, the best innovation initiatives come to nothing if your organization gets a few basic things wrong. Bad innovation habits can undo the best innovation intentions.

A Hands-Off Approach to Open Innovation Doesn’t Work

May-03-16. By Raghav Narsalay, Jitendra Kavathekar, David Light

For many business leaders — 85%, according to a recent Accenture survey — such open innovation is critical to their strategic plans. But many partnerships begin without due attention to what might go wrong, and the results show it. The challenges of big firm–small firm collaboration are considerable: different cultures, different attitudes about sharing intellectual property, different concerns about risk sharing, and others. So it’s no simple task to meet the strategic objectives of such partnerships.

6 Leadership Behaviors Drive Continuous Innovation

Apr-27-16. By Martin Zwilling

Every entrepreneur and business executive knows that continuous innovation is required to survive, but most struggle with this more than any other challenge they face. They know they need to act proactively, but still are often blindsided by a new competitor coming out of the blue with a future they never imagined. Innovation driven by the next crisis is not leadership.

Jeff Bezos on Culture: Failure and Invention are Inseparable Twins

Apr-26-16. By Jorge Barba

Failure can’t be separated from invention, it’s not optional. It’s also why you can’t mandate innovation, only inspire it. You can create the conditions necessary for it to happen, but it’s not a set-it and forget it deal.

What Makes Some Silicon Valley Companies So Successful

Apr-26-16. By Heitor Martins, Yran Bartolomeu Dias, Somesh Khanna

Over a week in Silicon Valley, we met with more than 50 people deliberately chosen to give us a broad cross-section of insights. We spent time with established digital players, midsize companies and startups. These conversations highlighted some attitudes and values that seemed to go a long way toward explaining Silicon Valley’s innovation identity. Here are the ones that struck us most.

5 Key Ingredients for Corporate Innovation

Apr-26-16. By Avner Mor

Here are five crucial ingredients that senior management should use to help their innovation projects succeed. When implemented together, these five ingredients can combine to promote valuable corporate innovation, in spite of the conditions that work against the success of innovation leaders within most large enterprises.

The Future Of Digital Workspaces Means More Meaningful Collaboration

Apr-20-16. By Larry Alton

Why do we work in offices? You could cite a handful of reasons, such as having a visible “headquarters” for your brand or maintaining more control over employee schedules, but when it comes down to it, offices exist to encourage collaboration. We have board rooms to host meetings, break rooms to encourage teambuilding and camaraderie during downtime, and we maintain semi-strict hours (i.e., 9-5) to make sure everyone’s available in one place, just in case we need to ask a question or hash out a problem. So what if there was a better way to collaborate? Would we need offices anymore?

9 Defining Characteristics of Successful Innovation

Apr-19-16. By Nick Skillicorn

Why is it that innovation is so hard to seriously talk about in most companies? Everyone agrees that it's important. In fact, when IBM interviewed 1,500 CEOs on what they thought the most important leadership quality was for the next 5 years, the most commonly cited trait was "Creativity", followed by "Integrity" and "Global thinking". They agree that coming up with new ideas for their business was vital for its survival and growth.

Scaling Innovation is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Apr-19-16. By Ann Mei Chang

“If you build it, they will come” only works in the movies. For the rest of us, it takes a concerted effort to build user demand for a product or service. Even if an innovation can dramatically improve lives, the intended user might not see it that way. And, of course, it can’t make an impact if people don’t know about it.

5 Reasons You’re Not Thinking Like an Innovator

Apr-18-16. By Mitchell Rigie, Keith Harmeyer

Is there a business person in the world today that doesn't want to be more innovative? We all know that the ability to consistently reinvent ourselves and the value we deliver in the marketplace - in other words, thinking like an innovator - is critical to success. And many people and organizations invest a great deal of time, energy, and resources into strengthening their innovation skills. So why is it that some of us find it so challenging? What gets in our way?

7 Essential Lessons from the Harvard Innovation Lab

Apr-14-16. By Gwen Morgan

Jodi Goldstein heads up the Harvard Innovation Lab (I-lab), a collaboration and education space launched in 2011 to help develop students’ interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. A Harvard MBA herself, it’s her job to get students to develop bold creative ideas and bring them to fruition. She uses a cross-disciplinary approach to foster new ways of thinking.

Why Platform Disruption Is So Much Bigger than Product Disruption

Apr-08-16. By Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere

Product-based disruptions have a strong “within the industry” effect; after all, being a serious threat or replacing the incumbent is a big deal. But platform-based disruptions have effects not only inside the industry but also well beyond industry boundaries.

If You Don’t Value Brilliance, You Don’t Value Innovation

Apr-08-16. By Jorge Barba

No traditionally managed corporation would ever hire a Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Larry Page type of person. Why? Because genius needs to be left alone, to be unleashed, to operate in chaos. And corporations want to put a leash on anything that challenges the status quo; they are afraid of genius because they can’t predict and control it.

What Is The Silicon Valley Secret Sauce For Innovation Success?

Apr-07-16. By Phil McKinney

There’s plenty of advice out there about how to make it in Silicon Valley. Some things are required for innovation success anywhere in the world, but the valley is a special place with different rules. As someone who’s spent a lot of time there, I think there are a few important elements to Silicon Valley’s success that others should know about if they’re trying to bring their ideas to life there.

Destructive and Constructive Innovation

Apr-06-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

Innovation will always create disruption in existing conventions, economies and industries. This means that it will also destroy EXISTING jobs. It does not mean, however, that innovation is constantly destroying the net number of jobs. This is what the media tells you, and it is wrong. What does happen is that the type of job changes.

Great Innovators Create the Future, Manage the Present, and Selectively Forget the Past

Mar-31-16. By Vijay Govindarajan

What’s missing from the managerial toolkit is a way for managers to allocate their—and their organization’s—time and attention and resources on a day-to-day basis across the competing demands of managing today’s requirements and tomorrow’s possibilities. But as anyone who has ever tried to lead innovation knows, the challenge goes beyond being ambidextrous enough to manage today’s business while creating tomorrow’s. There is a third, and even more intractable, problem: letting go of yesterday’s values and beliefs that keep the company stuck in the past.

How Large And Small Businesses Can Overcome the Innovation Paradox Together

Mar-31-16. By Mike Maddock

How can a sophisticated organization be so committed to a life-or-death mission [innovation] but still not achieve it? This was our innovation paradox.

Three Lessons on Innovation I Learned during my 12 years at Apple

Mar-26-16. By Kelli Richards

Here are three key lessons that characterize my experience at Apple and strike me as more relevant than ever today. 1) Consensus is not your friend. 2) Don't run back and forth seeking interim feedback. 3) Be wary of received wisdom.

Why Diversity In the Workforce Is Imperative

Mar-25-16. By Gabriel Bristol

To remain relevant in the competitive world of business, diversity is crucial to the success of a company as it can support businesses in continued growth and prosperity. New companies are emerging every day, and in order to stay ahead of the curve, it is important for business leaders and employees to come together and create a diverse workforce environment. Ultimately, diversity breeds innovation, which helps businesses achieve goals and tackle new challenges.

4 Ways Innovation is Changing Business

Mar-23-16. By Dennis Fortnum

The World Economic Forum calls this era of innovation the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In January government and business leaders met in Davos, Switzerland to discuss how to navigate these unprecedented changes. It is a monumental discussion, because the reality is that these regular and system-wide innovations will continue to crack the foundations of traditional industries for years to come. Businesses need to recognize this and make sure that they will be nimble enough to succeed wherever change takes them.

Real Businesses are Using Machine Learning

Mar-20-16. By Lukas Biewald

It’s not just futuristic-looking products like Siri and Amazon Echo. And it’s not just being done by companies that we normally think of as having huge R&D budgets like Google and Microsoft. In reality, I would bet that nearly every Fortune 500 company is already running more efficiently — and making more money — because of machine learning. So where is it happening? Here are a few behind-the-scenes applications that make life better every day.

Why B2B Companies Struggle with Collaborative Innovation

Mar-16-16. By Alessandro Di Fiore, Jonas Vetter

Innovating with customers should work well in B2B, as it should give companies a deeper knowledge of their customers and promote a trusting relationship. Unfortunately, it seldom turns out that way. Over and over again we’ve seen resources and time wasted on initiatives that die on the vine, destroying the trust that collaborative innovation ought to deliver while doing little to improve companies’ knowledge and performance.

Making Innovation Work for You

Mar-11-16. By Pat Bakey

Disruption is everywhere. From new digital business models and hyperconnectivity to the sharing economy, almost every industry is experiencing radical change. In the past, organizations could adapt fast enough to stay ahead of disruption. With digitization, however, the rate of change has accelerated beyond the ability of traditional companies to adjust.

Why Do Innovations Fail?

Mar-11-16. By Richard Miller

Many studies have been carried out on what differentiates successful from unsuccessful innovation projects, dating back to the 1970s. One characteristic of products that fail in the market keeps coming up and seems to be one of the dominant causes of failure: The product solved a problem the customer didn’t have.

So You're Trying to Innovate in a Heavily-Regulated Industry...

Mar-08-16. By Naomi Fried

Engaging in actual innovation is far from easy. There is experimentation, testing, tinkering and—sometimes—significant risk-taking. Often, the outcome is failure. In short, innovation with its risk of failure is SCARY.

4 Ways Established Businesses Can Disrupt Themselves and Win the Market

Mar-04-16. By Steve Olenski

If you're running an established business, you may feel that you've painted yourself into a corner. You've grown a customer base using the business you created and it's too late to go back. But as you watch new competitors come in and steal those customers away, you may realize how important it is to reinvent yourself every now and then. Here are a few ways you can use startup thinking to win the market, no matter how long you've been in business.

What is Open Innovation?

Mar-03-16. By Esteve Almirall, Wim Vanhaverbeke, Henry Chesbrough

Open Innovation is based on the fundamental idea that useful knowledge is now widespread throughout society. No one organization has a monopoly on great ideas, and every organization, no matter how effective internally, needs to engage deeply and extensively with external knowledge networks and communities. An organization that practices open innovation will utilize external ideas and technologies as a common practice in their own business and will allow unused internal ideas and technologies to go to the outside for others to use in their respective businesses.

Why Does Open Innovation Work?

Mar-03-16. By Esteve Almirall, Wim Vanhaverbeke, Henry Chesbrough

There are three reasons why Open Innovation works. First, in the traditional approach, the reliance is on deep vertical integration and internal R&D networks for innovative success. In the open innovation approach, there is much greater reliance on connection, collaboration, and partnerships for innovative success.

Learning to Learn

Mar-01-16. By Erika Andersen

Organizations today are in constant flux. Industries are consolidating, new business models are emerging, new technologies are being developed, and consumer behaviors are evolving. For executives, the ever-increasing pace of change can be especially demanding. It forces them to understand and quickly respond to big shifts in the way companies operate and how work must get done. In the words of Arie de Geus, a business theorist, “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Transparency is Key to Open Innovation

Feb-26-16. By Denys Resnick

Increasingly, though, significant players in their industries such as General Electric, Mondelēz International, Johnson Controls and Siemens have incorporated OI as a core process – not just for discrete situations. Instead of cracking the doors to R&D just enough to allow the rest of the world to peek in, they’ve flung them wide open. As a result, innovation flows through their organizations and powers them forward on a daily basis. How did they get comfortable with being so transparent? What did they realize that many of their competitors do not?

Walking The Tightrope On The Innovation Bell Curve

Feb-22-16. By Jeff DeGraff

Breakthrough innovation typically starts at the edges of the bell curve in the challenge of a crisis or the prospect of an outstanding opportunity. This is because the risk of deviating from the standard way of doing things and the reward of taking a chance on something new is reversed in these extremely negative and positive situations.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/business-innovation/walking-tightrope-innovation-bell-curve-01462672#TQj1d3w2DR10obmO.99

6 Accidental Ways Companies Kill Innovation

Feb-19-16. By Emily Wenstrom

We’ve all been there—someone pitches an idea, and it’s met with enthusiasm. Everyone is excited! The company wants to evolve; the company needs to evolve. A plan is quickly put in place to turn this fresh idea into reality. But, well, then the company starts acting like a company again. Over time, the idea loses all its momentum until it’s no longer the shiny, innovative idea it started as. It gets dialed back again and again until it’s completely unrecognizable, and it dies a slow, silent death. The company returns to its status quo.

Three Questions Leaders Should Ask About Innovation

Feb-19-16. By Christy Pettey

“Many leaders fall into the trap of trying to tackle innovation challenges simultaneously, which confuses things,” said Ms. Mesaglio. “Instead, it’s critical that they ask themselves these three questions in this order.”

Innovation and Maturity

Feb-16-16. By Jeffrey Phillips

How do we get a better understanding of who is merely talking about innovation, and who is actually practicing it? Beyond that, is there a way to determine who is merely sustaining a veneer of innovation, and which firms are driving innovation into the core of their business? Can we create a barometer of innovation capability and engagement? I think the answer is "yes", based on evidence we can observe and measure.

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