Author Archives: Andrea Meyer
Innovation tournaments can be run either competitively or collaboratively, with each approach yielding better results for different purposes. Stephen Shapiro’s tip #11, for example, tackles the topic of innovation competitions and tournaments. The tip focuses on what role, if any, collaboration should play in these bounty-driven events. Continue reading
Collaboration between doctors, patients, designers and lab technicians brings healthcare delivery breakthroughs. The inspiring origins of the Mayo Clinic illustrate the timelessness of collaborative innovation. Back in the 1880s… Continue reading
Technology and innovation enable greater customer engagement through open-ended customizations, apps, add-on, and social features. John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull, highlighted what he saw as a distinction between story vs. narrative. Continue reading
In a world of large organizations and diverse global hotspots for R&D, innovation occurs everywhere. Companies can tap those innovations through search processes, which may be cheaper and more effective than only using traditional “start from square one” R&D efforts. Continue reading
Point: Budget constraints demand frugal innovation. Story: In 2005, NASA’s Constellation program – tasked with designing a way to get humans to the moon and eventually to Mars – suffered a 45% reduction in R&D budgets during the process of getting Constellation running. “We knew those resources weren’t coming back,” said Jeff Davis, Director of the Space Life Sciences Directorate at NASA’s John Space Center. “We thought to ourselves, we can’t get this done just doing 45% less. We need to approach this whole program in a new way.” Davis’ team looked for new ways to work and began exploring alliances and external innovation platforms. The team hit upon the idea of using open innovation challenges at about the same time that President Obama’s Open Government Initiative encouraged public participation and the Office of Management and Budget issued guidelines on using prizes to spur public participation …
Point: Crowdsourcing and open innovation efforts rely on participation. Attracting participants and encouraging activity is a key success factor in obtaining and vetting new product, service and process innovation ideas. Story: Crowdsourcing is only as good as the crowd. Presenters at the World Research Group’s Innovation Cubed Summit described several methods that they use to engage people for internal innovation efforts. In particular, they talked about getting participation beyond just idea submission. Although some innovation contests have an easy-to-score objective measure of success (such as NetFlix’s rating algorithm contest or the get-to-space Ansari X PRIZE), most participatory innovation efforts cast a wider net and have more open-ended, subjective measures of performance. That means people need to evaluate all the submissions to find the best ones. These broad innovation contests involve more than just submitting a great idea (the proverbial 1% inspiration). The effort also …
