Monthly Archives: February 2011
Braden Kelley wrote an article entitled Is the era of Innovation Over? which I would like to build upon. Braden is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and is also the editor of Blogging Innovation. Braden picked up on an article lamenting the seemingly poor state of Canada’s innovation efforts with the view that “Innovation is literally hitting a wall”. Braden has also commented about the recent US approach to resolving their innovation approach and believes it is limited in its understanding and appreciation of innovation. Here in Europe we are certainly going through the same crisis of confidence with innovation, it is not producing the wealth and growth expected and needed to fuel our economies. The EU commissioner for innovation, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s first innovation commissioner, has started to created a lot of positive energy around some exciting new initiatives but are … Continue reading
Dear Blogging Innovation community, With help from you, the Blogging Innovation community, we are about to transform this site into something even more valuable. With your help, we hope to transform Blogging Innovation into THE innovation destination for people looking to make innovation a deep capability of their organization. And it’s dead simple. We just need you to answer a few simple questions to help shape the site expansion so it will be as valuable to you as possible. Here is the second installment: Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool. 1. If you’re on LinkedIn, please Join Innovation Excellence LinkedIn Group. 2. If you’re not on LinkedIn, please sign-up for our newsletter. Don’t miss an article (2,300+) – Subscribe to our RSS feed or join us on LinkedIn or Facebook. Braden Kelley is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & … Continue reading
I was recently asked for some input by Katharine Grayson, a journalist working on an article on open innovation in the Med-Tech industry. You can read the article, which focuses on the open innovation efforts by Medtronic here: Medtronic seeks ideas with new Web portal The questions and my answers went like this: 1. Is there anything about Medtronic’s web portal that strikes you as unique compared to other open-innovation efforts out there? No, on the contrary. The site is quite simple and looks like a first-generation site in which Medtronic is trying to test out how this will work. This is a good approach for some companies although it does seem to lack some ambition. 2. Do high-tech industries such as software, medical technology, bio-tech face different challenges than consumer-products companies (General Mills, etc.) when it comes to open innovation? If so, what are some of those unique challenges? … Continue reading
No Reason Why a Creative Person Cannot Also be a Professional by Idris Mootee I was talking to a publishing veteran from New York and showed him my new magazine M/I/S/C which will be in stores this week in US and in the next two weeks in 18 countries, he loved it and believed we have a winner here. Then he asked me how big is the team working in this and for how long? I quickly answered four people including me and all part time and it took 4 weeks. He looked surprised and said it would have taken him 5-6 full time people for six months to produce one issue, he couldn’t understand how we could move that fast. I said that’s the speed we operate. He was very impressed. One thing that many innovators and creative people assume incorrectly is that 1) they are as the only … Continue reading
If the innovation war is just beginning, then you need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside. The old way of succeeding in business was to hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition. But the battlefield of business success is changing. Future business success will be built upon the ability to: Utilize expert communities. Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe. Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control. Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity. At the same time, market leaders will … Continue reading
Accenture recently published a report on Managing Trust for High Performance. The essence of the report is that trust can be directly related to corporate performance, and that losing trust with customers and other stakeholders is one of the surest ways to destroy value. Trust can also be measured and managed. Open Innovation is an activity that is also highly dependent on trust for success. So what does that mean in practice? Open Innovation simplistically involves two partners; one with a problem and one with a solution. Whoever approaches whom is less important than the fact that they need to trust each other to make the project work. There are things that you can do to start on a firm foundation of trust and carry on to the successful conclusion of a project, hopefully leading to a fruitful alliance of serial innovation output. …
