Author Archives: Paul Hobcraft
Open Innovation (OI) has been around for some years, in the past three to four years the notion of open innovation has accelerated and moved very much and becoming embedded into the structure of many organizations. Presently most organizations are dealing with the roadblocks surrounding open innovation either internally within their own structures or with the potential partners that they want to work with, for a more diverse innovation portfolio. Arguably open innovation will merge into simply a way of doing innovation, then into something more specific. For me that is more into a collaboration and co-creation innovative approach I touch upon further into this article Today we are broadly at a maturing stage of OI. In summary you could say: The potential benefits of OI are recognized and receiving management attention The OI approaches taken vary according the business context, resources and maturity of the innovation process internally within … Continue reading
Sometimes you become concerned, this is one of those moments. I’m getting concerned that we need to take some urgent action. The Corporate Innovation Manager – is stuck in the middle. Recently I was going through a report, a very helpful one on the on the Corporate Innovation Function – summarizing key findings and detailed results from a study commissioned by HEC Paris. I was also reading some views expressed by Reinhard Büscher, Head of Innovation Policy at the European Commission, on the role of the innovation manager (IM). Both paint a rather dismal picture of the position of the Innovation Manager within organizations – very fuzzy not yet well defined. Briefly although HEC’s study suggests the main role of the IM is to create growth and to differentiate the company in its markets but it also paints the IM into a corner and certainly not in the corner office! … Continue reading
Will ecosystems replace simple ‘old’ innovation collaborations as we know them today? Open innovation has suddenly lost its pole position. Board rooms around the world will be thinking through the events that unfolded recently and I’m not talking about Eygpt. Just get into the story that has been unfolding at Nokia in the recent weeks, it has been breathtaking but it signals a massive change in where innovation will be going. Let me summarize some of this story and add some of my own thoughts on what this means. Firstly the famous burning platform memo within Nokia. In early February Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia issued a ‘burning platform’ memo internally We are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behavior. The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behavior, and take a … Continue reading
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
In my work investigating different aspects of innovation activity one thought tends to dominate my thinking: “How do we achieve a better understanding of the dynamics of innovation within our capabilities to be more successful?” I’ve already asked in previous blogs if people are checking their innovation pulse and opening up their thinking to dynamic capabilities for innovation success. I’d like to take this one step further in this blog and outline my thinking on innovation fitness landscapes and why they are essential to understand. Each organization needs to know its own Innovation Fitness Landscape There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments. It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the … Continue reading
You hear constantly the need for greater speed, increased agility, and effective delivery from ideas to implementations for innovation. Yet we still keep these organizational needs locked into those old structures, systems and processes that have been layered one on top of the other as we learned about innovation over the years. We often simply kept adapting these (often badly) into the existing way we were managing innovation. Isn’t it time we addressed this growing issue of adapting, stopped the compromising and started redesigning our innovation systems from afresh with present day leading innovation practice thinking? Managing innovation as a system is no different from managing IT for example. You get to a given point where the costs of running innovations through your existing systems continue to rise. You begin to diminish your innovation performance. Speed to market seems never to improve the way you want it too, …
