Author Archives: Stefan Lindegaard
I recently made another trip to China. My purpose was to meet with innovation leaders in order to build further on my understanding of the Chinese innovation community and thus on my global perspectives on innovation.I had a couple of meetings and I did an improvised session at a company. Having met about 15 people and having spent 5 days in Beijing, I have to say that my expectations of what will happen in China grew even higher. The reason for this is the innovation people of China.They are hungry, bright and very eager to learn. Yes, they still have a lot to learn. And many of them do not seem to have the creative mindset and the ability to think in a more holistic way which I believe is necessary in order to make innovation happen. These are tough things to learn and many Chinese people will never get … Continue reading
Having been involved in several efforts on developing the innovation culture within companies, I have learned that you need to work with three organizational approaches.I call this the TBX approach:T (Top Down)Get the executives onboard and make them personally committed to the innovation activities. Without executive support, no change occurs.B (Bottom Up)Value creation begins with people, one by one, team by team. Nothing happens unless you get the employees engaged and involved. Take ideas, feedback and other input from employees seriously. If ideas just seem to run down a sinkhole and never to re-emerge or if leaders are not able to commit resources to any ideas, you will lose the trust of the employees.X (Across)The biggest challenges will come from the middle managers placed across the organization. A key reason is that middle managers have a narrow focus on their own profit and loss responsibility. They do not see the … Continue reading
A few weeks back someone told me an interesting story about Procter & Gamble and their competitors. It is well-known that P&G is the open innovation champion and their long focus on open innovation has given them an important advantage.They get to see interesting proposals within their business areas before their competitors. In the story I heard, one of P&G competitors complained they only saw ideas and proposals that P&G already had rejected. Ouch, talk about being a second-tier choice…This leads to a very important point on open innovation for market leading companies and those aspiring to be. The key game is to become the preferred partner of choice.A preferred partner of choice simply gets to see the best ideas first and such a position can help a company out-innovate their competitors and develop substantial long term overall business advantages.As each industry only has one – or perhaps two – … Continue reading
I have been asked to present my views on how small and medium-sized companies can move to the next level by implementing open innovation and intrapreneurship.I am still working on the presentation, but below you can see some bullet-points I plan to include in the 3 hour-long session. What do you think? Am I missing something important?Besides hearing your comments here, it would be great to get out and share this with other companies, organizations and event organizers around the world. Let me know if you would like to discuss these:The ChallengeGrowing a startup is very much about executing on a great product, idea or technology. However, as the company grows focus tend to shift towards control rather than keeping the visionary thinking and bold approaches that build the company. This must be re-ignited. Understanding open innovation and intrapreneurship can help do this.All the best people do not work hereOne … Continue reading
I have always respected Nokia which I consider to be a quite innovative company. Lately, I have been wondering how they approach open innovation so I did some research on their activities.First, let’s take a look at how Nokia defined open innovation in a presentation given by Kari-Pekka Estola, VP, Nokia Research Center in 2007.”The sourcing, integration, and development of product and business system innovations through win-win external partnerships to capture maximum commercial value for R&D investment.”Kari-Pekka Estola also argued that open innovation is a critical trend and not yet another management fad due to these reasons:Innovation happens in smaller companies, global innovation hotspots and increasingly influential user communities.Several factors such as workforce mobility and venture capital are eroding the ability of corporate research labs to contain their useful knowledge.A new breed of independent research labs create a new source of R&D development.”Innomediaries” – innovation intermediaries – are enabling an … Continue reading
I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:”Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not so obvious with other professions. Engineers are prone to share, to seek out other engineers when they face a mental block.”Wow! Are good engineers … Continue reading
