Monthly Archives: April 2011
When I was a boy I used to enjoy visiting my grandparents and one of my favorite objects in their living room was a globe where the countries would light up as different colors when I switched the globe on. After seeing all of these countries I would often go to the trusty Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the bookshelf to find out more about these places and what people actually did there. The power of maps is that they help us to think about where we are in relation to other people and places. Last week I wrote a post about the significance of global connections for stimulating innovation and a few comments and tweets got me thinking about the importance of having a global innovation map. John Hagel tweeted that he wasn’t convinced that the global connections were more important than local, implying that both were probably important. The post … Continue reading
I was recently asked for examples on high-tech companies that practice open innovation. It is a good question as we most often see open innovation examples among low-tech and fast-moving-consumer-good companies. Nevertheless, open innovation is relevant for all industries and we are starting to see high-tech and B2B companies with open innovation-like initiatives that are visible to the public eye. Some examples: Psion Medtronic Cisco DSM HP SAP Shell (GameChanger) Xerox Weyerhaeuser Intuit (Collaboratory) It is important to notice that many of these companies have other open innovation-like initiatives besides these public sites. Actually, it seems as if having such websites (which I refer to as destination or point-of-entry sites) are good indicators of open innovation awareness although often still in the early stages. I also find it interesting that many high-tech and B2B companies in general have open innovation-like initiatives, but they prefer to lay low on this rather … Continue reading
Feels Like the First Time by Robert F. Brands with Jeff Zbar When was the last time you experienced your product like it was your first time? Product development is a process of cycles – followed by closure. We innovate and create a new concept. Assemble teams to research, develop, manufacture and market the product or service. We then ship it to market. And then… What? We leave it out there for consumers to embrace, or ignore. Meanwhile, as our products mature on the store shelves of the marketplace, we mentally have moved on to the next next thing. Instead, we should revisit our product to gain a fresh perspective. The CBS Television show Undercover Boss follows the adventures of executives who embark on an undercover mission “to examine the inner workings of their companies…Working alongside their employees, they see the effects that their decisions have on others, where the … Continue reading
Important for CEOs to Maintain and Reset Focus by Idris Mootee Let’s start with this…this is not the best title. I really don’t like the word “brainstorming.” It means a group of people getting together to generate a lot of deas for the solution of a problem. In 1953 Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the method in his book called Applied Imagination, he proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming. Fully the book title is called Applied Imagination, which is very appropriate, and the trick is on the “Applied” part. The authors of BRAINSTEERING by Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne pointed out the problem with brainstorming today is a bunch of people selected (for technical or political reasons) and put together in a room and an external moderator asking people to think outside the box. Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow which I am … Continue reading
Suffice it to say I was honored my friend Chris Thoen would agree to talk about P&G’s Open Innovation history at the 3rd Open Innovation (OI) Summit at Baldwin Wallace College’s Center for Innovation & Growth: Practical Challenges of Global Open Innovation. Chris has been interviewed, quoted, written about extensively as a leader in OI, including on these pages, and for good reason. Some of you may know P&G’s history, some may not. 175 years ago, two brother-in-laws, William Procter (candle maker) and James Gamble (soap maker), using the same raw material, fats, were encouraged by their father-in-law to collaborate to get better ‘fat’ pricing! This was the start of P&G. They grew the company with their own innovations and through (un-named at the time) open innovation with other technology makers and companies. These partnerships were the foundation of P&G’s growth into 300 brands in over 180 countries, 24 billion dollar brands and most … Continue reading
By – Paul Hobcraft Walking that narrow innovation pathway needs some rethinking. “Innovation is the pathway to travel and seek out our future” Today there is as much a gap between the aspiration to innovate and the ability to deliver on this. We still continue to ignore the constant suggestion that innovation should be systematic so the organization can provide some degree of reliability to innovate in a continuous fashion. We often allow the concept of ‘holistic’ to simply float over us and ignore the intimate connection between strategic thinking, innovation and their alignment. It is still sad we seem not to go beyond a certain point in our innovation thinking, it continues along a narrow path of limited understanding. Will it ever change? I appreciate the statement, I think made by John Kao: “Strategy is useless without innovation, innovation is directionless without strategy.” Innovation can be strategies catalyst but … Continue reading
