Innovation labs or rapid innovation centers are developing at fast pace. Just last week I was discussing about the set-up of an innovation lab in one African country where Orange operates. It often comes to the following 4 questions: What is the aim of the lab, and how will it operate? How to on-board and communicate? How to select the ...

Open innovation, a rarity in sick care, depends on the free flow of information from inside to outside and vice versa. For that to happen, it takes a permeable membrane to drive osmotic flow of information and possible solutions across the separator. Like a polaroid lens that allows you to see things only when the optical conditions are right, likewise, ...

Fabrice Marsella is head of the Le Village by CA Paris or the village’s Mayor as they say! Benoît Bourdin is Deputy Head of Le Village, and responsible for Partners & CA Group connections / International Network. The Village is the startup accelerator initiated by Credit Agricole (CA) Banking company which looks at detecting and supporting the next French unicorns in FinTech, ...

Recently, Match-Maker Ventures and Arthur D. Little have released an interesting report, titled “The Age of Collaboration“. The study does a good job in synthesizing the global state of play of corporate-startup collaboration and latest findings on success requirements for its implementation. More and more corporations seek to engage with startups by pursuing corresponding activities across dedicated ecosystems and incorporating them in exploration units along with ...

In most organizations, there is an omnipresent quest for more. With crowd-sourcing innovation programs, the first impulse is to seek more ideas. Is more really better? What about idea quality? Does ‘more ideas’ work against idea quality? And if so, then what do you do about it? In 2011, I launched the employee open innovation program at UnitedHealth Group (Fortune ...

This is the third blog in our series of three blogs, on cultivating a fail fast culture. In last month’s blog, Cultivating a Fail Fast Culture – as a manifestation of learning & exploration we explored what it means to take a reflective stance, to use the experience of failure to support ourselves and others we interact with, as a ...

This is the second blog in a series of 3 blogs, by Janet Sernack, on cultivating a fail fast culture. In my previous blog “What does it mean to cultivate a fail fast organizational culture” I shared what typically happens when people experience failure, and how important it is to uncouple people’s fears about failure and to support and enable ...

How could developing a “fail fast” culture help organizations unfreeze, survive, flow and flourish with the current levels of fear, ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility and instability in 21st century organizations?

After relying on cost and operational efficiencies to grow the bottom line, many businesses are emerging from an innovation slumber post-recession. Now there is an imperative to refocus on organic growth. The importance of innovation in driving this growth is resurfacing to the top of the agenda. For many organizations, there are some radically new behavioural, structural and operational models of meeting this challenge are gaining popularity.

We aren’t all child geniuses turned mega entrepreneurs, but there are 3 things that as fellow innovators, we can learn from Elon Musk. He epitomises thinking big.