3 Open Innovation Failures: Boeing, LEGO and Pharma. We are seeing lots of open innovation progress and companies are keen to share success-stories. We do not hear much about the failures, but here you get three examples. Boeing 787 Dreamliner: I think it is now fair to say that Boeing has a solid failure at hands when it comes to the building (and innovation) process of the otherwise great aircraft (well, once they fix the safety issues that is). Just consider this quote from Boeing: “More than 50 of the world’s most capable top-tier supplier partners are working with Boeing to bring innovation and expertise to the 787 program. Given their many delays and now the safety issues, I think the conclusion is clear. LEGO Universe: I really like how LEGO embraces open innovation in general, but they also had an early failure with their LEGO Universe project, which you can read about in this post.
The pharma industry: As it might be unfair to mention LEGO above, it might be a bit premature to include the pharma industry here. InShare27. Frugal Innovation: A New Business Paradigm. GUEST COMMENTARY: What do Renault-Nissan, Siemens, and Unilever have in common? They are all pioneers of a groundbreaking business strategy called frugal innovation. Frugal innovation is the ability to generate considerably more business and social value while significantly reducing the use of scarce resources. It’s about solving—and even transcending—the paradox of “doing more with less”. Frugal innovation is a game-changing strategy for an “Age of Austerity” in which firms are being compelled by cost-conscious and eco-aware consumers, employees, and governments to create offerings that are simultaneously affordable, sustainable, and of high quality. Even more than a strategy, frugal innovation is a whole new mindset, a flexible approach that perceives resource constraints not as a debilitating challenge but as a growth opportunity.
Paul Polman, the no-nonsense CEO of Unilever, is a corporate leader who strongly believes that resource scarcity can be a catalyst for radical innovation. Embracing Enterprise Innovation - Empowering the Masses through Innovation Communities. The ripening of Adafruit and the maker movement - Ideas@Innovations. Created in China. Authors: Silvia Lindtner, David Li Hackerspaces are shared studios that bring together people committed to the free and open sharing of software and hardware, as well as ideas and knowledge.
As of April 2012, there are more than 500 active hackerspaces in existence worldwide, making them a global phenomenon [1]. A typical studio will be equipped with tools that allow for experimenting with the physical/digital boundary—laser cutters, 3-D printers, microcontroller kits, and so forth. Many hackerspaces also host educational workshops where these tools are used to teach others about manipulating the physical environment through software, or vice versa. The global hackerspace movement has helped proliferate a “maker culture” that revolves around both technological and social practices of creative play, peer production, a commitment to open source principles, and a curiosity about the inner workings of technology [2,3].
(literal translation: new workshop, or new factory). Making Community ). How Innovation Processes Began at Shell and IBM. In today’s article I will review the beginnings in innovation programs implemented by companies Shell and IBM, using the A-to-F Model described in the book Winning at Innovation . In the mid 1990s Shell created the “GameChanger” panel, a group of creatively minded mid-level executives who could also draw on other technical resources across the company. They were given the task of developing new ideas, using a $20 million budget to implement disruptive ideas. The GameChanger panel, in turn, created several more teams to perform some of the basic functions of the innovation process: an innovation lab, would be responsible to explore, refine and improve ideas, and a committee of entrepreneurs, who would be responsible for assessing and financing the winning projects. The GameChanger Panel began in one division: exploration and production. There is even a special GameChanger team, dedicated to radical projects that fall outside the boundaries of Shell’s existing businesses.
Evolutionary, Revolutionary or Blended Innovation: Which is Right for Your Organization? Can Lean Co-exist with Innovation? “Lean” has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in-time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement — supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation, or would lean’s structure and discipline snuff out the creative spark that underlies the birth and development of great ideas?
Can lean co-exist with innovation? According to experts at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Wharton faculty, lean and innovation can indeed complement each other, and it’s about time they came together. Lean brings structure and predictability to innovation, and sharpens the distinction between idea generation and the development process, they say. Both share a common goal: to meet customer needs in a cost-effective manner. And lean can help empower researchers and reduce uncertainty in the innovation process itself. Redefining the Individual and the Team. Visualising Innovation Eco-Systems | InnovoFlow – Freedoms to Innovate. Fragile eco-systems (photo Simon Evans) How do we look at the big picture of Innovation? There are many different models of innovation out there, and they all have their respective merits and challenge our thinking in different ways.
In this (hopefully) post recession world however it is time that we take another look at how we are all looking at and thinking about our innovation capability. There is a common perception that innovation is getting harder (see any of the recent Boston Consulting papers for example), and that our “freedoms to innovate” feel like they have been curtailed. Our successful approaches in the past may no longer be good enough in this new world – unless we refresh out thinking there is a danger that we will end up stuck in the past trying to repeat those successes. Innovation as we all know is not about a single magic formula, or a process that we can just implement and succeed. Why an Eco-System?
Populating the Innovation Eco-system Some things are obvious. Summary. Schumpeter: Pretty profitable parrots. Absolut Creates 4 Million Unique Vodka Bottles [Video] Absolut Vodka recently launched ‘Absolut Unique,’ a project in which the vodka makers will release 4 million limited-edition, unique bottles. The project required a company’s production plant to be completely re-engineered; the ‘carefully orchestrated randomness’ to the bottle design involves using complex pattern programming alongside splash guns and color-generating machines to ensure that no two bottles come out the same. image from Apt Blog The vodka bottles will be individually numbered and will be distributed globally in 80 markets, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and China.
Joan’s Tahlin, VP of Global Marketing at Absolut, commented that: Absolut Unique feels a bit mad scientist, a bit street art. Watch the video below for the behind-the-scenes of the project: Absolut. Is Your Innovation Really Unnovation? - Umair Haque. By Umair Haque | 11:26 AM May 27, 2009 Innovation, today, is the most vital and impor — brrrring!!!! We interrupt this hackneyed old cliche to bring you an announcement. Here’s a different suggestion for how — and how not — to innovate. Boardrooms today have an insatiable appetite for innovation. Yet, few can get it right once in a blue moon, let alone master it.
Most innovation, well, isn’t: it is “unnovation,” or innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value. In the race to innovate, most organizations forget a simple but fundamental economic truth. Unfortunately, much of what our economy produces today isn’t innovative — it’s unnovative. Here are some examples of unnovation. The Hummer was a product unnovation, which destroyed value for both society and Detroit. CDOs were a financial unnovation, that crippled the financial system, and have cost everyone hundreds of billions. Hedge funds are (probably) a management unnovation. Windows was, many years ago, an innovation. Frugal Innovation: Lessons from Carlos Ghosn, CEO, Renault-Nissan - Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja. Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, famously coined the term “frugal engineering” in 2006.
He was impressed by Indian engineers’ ability to innovate cost-effectively and quickly under severe resource constraints. And under Ghosn’s leadership , Renault-Nissan has proactively embraced frugal engineering and become one of the world’s leading producers of both electric cars as well as low-cost vehicles — two of the fastest growing and most promising market segments in the global automotive sector. Recently, in New York, we participated in a panel discussion organized by the Asia Society called “Jugaad Innovation: Reigniting American Ingenuity” (you can watch a video here). We were honored to have Ghosn as our key panelist.
During the panel discussion, Ghosn explained that Western automakers must sacrifice the “bigger is better” R&D model and adapt to frugal engineering. 3) Tap partners in emerging markets who excel at innovating more with less. Open Innovation Spotlight. Technology - Kanyi Maqubela - The Power and the Peril of Our Crowdfunded Future. Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley on the rise of "Kickstarters for XYZ" Andrey Pavlov/Shutterstock Since Kickstarter launched in April of 2009, we, the crowd, have funded a quarter of a billion dollars worth of art projects, small businesses, tech gear, etc. Some of these, like the Brydge, a beautiful iPad accessory, and gTar, a guitar-iPhone hybrid that recalls Guitar Hero, have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others, like the Pebble, an iPhone-integrated wristwatch, have raised millions. The average project walks away with approximately $5000, and just under half of the projects on Kickstarter meet their fundraising goals and get the money.
The company has ignited a movement in technology to create copycat crowdfunding platforms that will fund a huge range of ideas. It seems there will soon be platforms to raise money for almost anything, from the local bakery you hope to start in your neighborhood, to your high-technology startup idea, to donations for a church mission trip.
How Slow Money Can Support Healthy Communities. What does it look like to start a values-based business with members of your community? Gather is a sustainable restaurant that serves as a successful model. Located in downtown Berkeley, California and catering to conscious foodies, the farm-to-table eatery keeps thriving with an omnivore-friendly menu and steady reservations. Esquire magazine named it one of the top restaurants of 2010 with Sean Baker its Chef of the Year and The New York Times described it as a “Michael Pollan book come to life.” When owners and mountaineering guide-friends Eric Fenster and Ari Derfel developed their business plan 10 years ago, they had no formal culinary or business training.
It was smart planning, relationship building, and a new way to raise funds that made their vision possible. Derfel considers himself an “unusual entrepreneur with unusual motivation.” Over 65 investors and their partners were drawn to the idea of funding the community food system close to home. FarmHack: Collaboratively Retooling Agriculture. FarmHack is a network for sharing open source know-how amongst the distributed fringe of DIY agricultural tech aficionados and innovators. In the same vein as Appropedia or Open Source Ecology, a collaborative digital knowledge-base facilitates the harvest of crowd wisdom to address challenges and inefficiencies in modern ecological (and economical) farm operation. It is a project of Young Farmers Coalition and somewhat angled to the exuberant and tech-savvy eco-preneurial demographic, but inclusive and supportive of all open earthy inhabitants.
A primary focus of the organization is toward intensive development meet-ups, teach-ins, and hackathons, in person, on the farm. Just after landing at my new rural summer farm home and hack-factory in Vermont, I learned of one such get-together nearby on Lake Champlain. Close to 30 attendees converged from across New England, bearing pedigrees ranging from electrical engineering to graphic novel artist. Innovation, the “rugby approach”: thoughts for thoughts from 24 years ago. I’ve referred in “Metaphor and belief, 2 frameworks to found creativity” to the excellent work on innovation performed by Ikujiro Nonaka. I’ve found another sharp article from the same author published 24 years ago at Harvard Business Review, January-February 1986: nevertheless “The new product development game“ seems to me incredibly topical! Ikujiro speaks about how companies must adapt to fierce competition and develop speed and flexibility.
He thinks there is new game in product development, which means moving from traditional sequential phases to a “rugby approach” involving a team in constant interaction, multidisciplinary, whose members work together from start to finish. The team practices iterative experimentation, and overlap across several phases. This approach is essential to company seeking to develop new products quickly and flexibly. Moreover, this strategy can act as an agent of change for the larger organization.
Biography: Like this: Like Loading... Innovative Design: creating unknown objects. I had the chance to attend a few weeks ago a lecture on C-K design theory. It was delivered by brilliant professors Pascal Le Masson and Benoît Weill, two among the three referents in C-K methodology, the third being the lead professor Armand Hatchuel, Professor of Management Sciences and Design Engineering, Ecole des Mines, Paris. Let me try to guide you to this formal innovative design approach. Why do we need a new innovative design approach?
According to Pascal Le Masson, “objects are shifting their identity“. All industries are concerned by this identity shift, innovation is deeply impacted as innovators have to create something unknown. How do we work on unknown, undecidable objects? What is C-K methodology, and what are his roots? Professor Hatchuel defines C-K Theory or Concept-Knowledge Theory as a theory of reasoning in design. What is creativity? How can we achieve this ? How can we make this expansion systematic? What does C-K add to this? One step further Like this: Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation.