A Highlight and Note by Gonçalo Marques from Winning At Innovation: The A-to-F Model. Sources of Innovative Ideas. A recent report from Grant Thornton surveyed corporations worldwide to determine where they found their innovative ideas. The study revealed that customers were now the leading source of ideas for new products and services. Firms in Asia Pacific were particularly attuned to what their customers want with almost half (48 per cent) of the best innovative ideas coming from customers against 40 per cent in Western Europe and 35 per cent in North America. In summary the origins of ideas were as follows as rated by percentage of respondents: Customers 41% Heads of Business Units 35% Employees 33% Internal R&D 33% Partners & Suppliers 26% Sales 17% Do you work with customers on a systematic basis as a source of innovation?
The recommendations in the summary of the report are: 1. 2. 3. 4. It is time to look outside for your ideas, your innovation and your growth. Allocate Time for Innovation. One of the commonest barriers to innovation is lack of time. People are just too busy doing their day job to spend time trying new things. The common assumption is that working hard and working long hours are good things and sufficient for success. The mantra is - 'Focus on delivering this quarter's results.' It is as though we are so busy building rafts to cross the river that we never look up to consider building a bridge, or a tunnel or a dam or fording the river or building boats or planes or all the other things we could do.
We just focus on producing those rafts. If you want people to be creative then set the goal (e.g. crossing the river) and then challenge them to come up with ideas. Give them time and some resources to test their ideas - to build prototypes, or to investigate what people elsewhere are doing. Google allows its people to spend one day a week on innovative ideas. The message is clear. Paul Sloane writes and gives keynote talks on Innovation. Train for Innovation. Is innovation some chance occurrence that comes in a flash of brilliance by the CEO? Is it the domain of just a handful of creative geniuses? No. You can establish a culture and a process for innovation throughout the organization. It takes leadership.
A good place to start is with training. How did your organization acquire its skills in quality, sales, marketing, people management, finance and all the other myriad competences that you use? You hired people with the skills or you trained people so that they acquired the skills or people learn on the job. The main areas for training include: Problem Analysis Questioning Listening Idea Generation Managing Brainstorms Idea Evaluation De Bono's Six Thinking Hats Prototype development Project gating Project management Generic training courses are available and there is some benefit in mixing with people from other environments. Tell Stories. We live in a world with information overload. We are flooded with data, facts, statistics and information in all forms. Definitive answers to specific questions are immediately available from search engines on the internet. But people want more than facts.
They want understanding. They want meaning. They want context. How do you tell a story? 1. 2. 3. 4. Go through your own life and think about some of your most vivid memories, some of the difficulties or problems you faced, some of the funny or emotional things that happened to you. When in later life you think about your parents or grandparents what you will most likely remember are not the facts about their lives nor details of their earnings, wealth or qualifications.
Build your own store of interesting stories. E. Paul Sloane speaks and writes on innovation, creativity, lateral thinking and leadership. KLM Airlines Passengers Can Pick Their Seatmate Using Facebook. Make Your Own Products Obsolete. The fear of 'cannibalisation' has prevented many a promising idea. And yet it seems clear that if you do not cannibalise your own product line with better, cheaper, faster, more effective or more appealing products then your competitors surely will.
American radio manufacturers dominated the radio market in the early 1950s. They knew about transistor technology but did not develop it as they did not want to threaten their high quality and high value valve based radios. They disdained transistors as cheap and tinny with low power and low quality. The Japanese radio makers took advantage of this oversight to build better and better transistor radios and they eventually took the full market and wiped out the incumbent suppliers.
Encyclopedia Britannica had a very successful business model built on expensive sets of hardback encyclopedias. Nowadays things are different. If GE can cannibalise its light bulb business then you can do the same with your products. Amazon.co. E-Reader Display Shows Vibrant Color Video. Even as the processing power and download speeds of mobile devices surge, one component still lags behind: the screen.
LCD panels use significantly more power than any other component of a phone or tablet because of their need to pump out bright light to form an image. The only practical alternative is e-ink, the technology used in the Amazon Kindle; it consumes orders of magnitude less power but sacrifices color and the ability to change images fast enough for video playback or smooth game play. Now, after years of waiting, alternative technology that promises the best of both approaches is finally edging closer to commercialization.
During a recent visit to mobile chipmaker Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, Technology Review tried out a full-color, 5.7-inch Android tablet with a display that offers rich colors under bright light, close to those of an LCD and not unlike the pages of a magazine. 7 Challenges for Corporate Innovation Units. What are the key challenges for corporate innovation units? Let’s have a discussion on this. Below you get my starters. Your input is highly appreciated! Hit the window! The window of opportunity gets smaller and smaller and the time to success decreases. In short, cash cows are a dying race. Organize for fast pace, fast change! Crack the X!
Develop yourself and your teams! Open up your efforts! Build sandboxes – and use them! Become better communicators! What do you think? InShare27. Kinect Effect. Productivity Future Vision (2011) The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key. The elements that make up a truly innovative company are many: a focused innovation strategy, a winning overall business strategy, deep customer insight, great talent, and the right set of capabilities to achieve successful execution.
More important than any of the individual elements, however, is the role played by corporate culture — the organization’s self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing — in tying them all together. Yet according to the results of this year’s Global Innovation 1000 study, only about half of all companies say their corporate culture robustly supports their innovation strategy. Moreover, about the same proportion say their innovation strategy is inadequately aligned with their overall corporate strategy. This article is featured in the strategy+business app “Don’t Blame Your Culture,” available for smartphone and tablet devices. To download, select your device: This disconnect, as the saying goes, is both a problem and an opportunity.
Five Reasons Companies Fail at Business Model Innovation - Saul Kaplan. By Saul Kaplan | 12:41 PM October 21, 2011 Business model innovation is the new strategic imperative—by now, this is becoming more generally acknowledged. But companies routinely fail at self-reinvention because they are so busy pedaling the bicycle of their current business models they leave no time, attention, or resources to design, prototype, and test new ones. Even where investments are made in innovation, those efforts are focused on new products and services delivered through today’s business models and on making the current models operate more efficiently.
These are important to do, without doubt. Having watched many companies over the years as they recognize the imperative to change, yet somehow stay stuck in their old grooves, I’ve noted some patterns in their experience. CEOs don’t really want a new business model. Product is king. Cannibalization is off the table. ROI hurdles are too aggressive for fledgling models. Rogues and renegades get no respect. The physics behind. Quantum Levitation: The Coolest Science You'll See Today. The clip, which has been making its way around the 'net since its debut this weekend, was taken at the 2011 ASTC conference, a gathering of sciencefolk in Baltimore, Maryland designed to demonstrate "how science centers and museums are putting new ideas to practical use to serve their communities. " This vignette is a demonstration by Israel's Tel Aviv University of a phenomenon called "quantum levitation. " Though the video itself fails to explain the physics behind the disk's baffling ability to maintain orientation despite non-trivial factors like gravity and the rampant disbelief of onlookers, the University put together a website to explain things .
If I'm understanding this correctly, the disk (which is a sapphire wafer coated with an ultrathin layer of yttrium barium copper oxide) is cooled to below negative 185 degrees Celsius. At that temperature the material becomes superconductive (read: it is able to conduct electricity with no energy loss). Science fiction author Arthur C. The Challenge of Managing Innovation and the Core Business. Title: Embracing Paradox Authors: Michael L. Tushman (Harvard Business School), Wendy K. Smith (University of Delaware), and Andy Binns (Change Logic LLC) Publisher: Harvard Working Paper No. 11-110 Date Published: May 2011 In the fall of 2008, as the scope of the economic crisis was becoming clear, the CEO of Misys PLC, a software and services company focused on healthcare and the financial sector, was facing a quandary: The business was under pressure, and an expensive new initiative to develop an open source system for healthcare software was not yet producing profits.
The CEO balked, however. Nonetheless, the CEO’s decision to foster competitive tension among his senior executives proved successful. Principle #1: Develop an overarching identity. How IBM Innovates. 20 Coisas Que Aprendemos Para Inovar. Is radical innovation a thing of the past? Projected Backseat Entertainment - GEELab Creates a Holographic Game for Children in the Car. The diligent researchers at GEELab (Games and Experimental Entertainment Laboratory) are hard at work on their latest innovation: holographic backseat entertainment. Try to imagine yourself as a 6-year-old, loudly complaining from the backseat about boredom and leg cramps. Instead of delivering a stern lecture on how a little solitude builds character, your parents will just turn on the holographic game system in the near future. GEELab, based out of Australia, has unveiled its newest technology that allows children to play in a virtual reality world from the comfort of a minivan.
The 3-D game environment will be controlled via hand and body gestures, similar to Microsoft's Kinect, and could be extended to display travel information and weather. It intrigues me endlessly to think that the generations coming up behind me will grow up with their favorite cartoon characters speaking and playing with them every day -- almost like a true-to-life imaginary friend! The 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating. September 22, 2011The 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating If you need to innovate, but find yourself procrastinating, your excuse is on this list. While you may have all the "proof" you need to prove yourself right, being right doesn't necessarily increase your odds of innovating.
So, take a look, note the ones that bug you, and find a way to go over, under, around, or through them. 1. I don't have the time. 2. 6. 11. 16. 21. 26. 31. 36. 41. 46. 51. 56. 61. 66. 71. 76. 81. 86. 91. 96. 1. 2. 3. 4. One way to get help Other ways to go beyond. Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at September 22, 2011 08:53 AM Thanks for the list of excuses! If it's any consolation to you - we hear many of them here in Germany, too... While some of the excuses are trivial and easy to counteract, others are more insidious and are symptomatic of deep-lying organisational problems or misunderstandings. Regards Graham Posted by: Graham Horton at April 20, 2008 07:55 AM Posted by: edtechworkshop at May 4, 2008 09:31 AM EXCUSE ME!! You Gotta Love Lego – Crowdsourcing meets Open Innovation! Yes, you gotta love Lego! Not only is the company doing amazingly well during this ”crisis”; they are also constantly experimenting with new ways of working together with partners.
Their new thing is Lego Cuusoo. Here Lego has teamed up with Cuusoo, which is a Japanese pioneer of user innovative product design that introduced a design-to-order process already in 1998. This image gives you a good explanation of the project: Sofar only 1 project has been realized, but once Lego Cuusoo expands beyond Japan and thus activates the huge international fan base, this could turn into an interesting vehicle for Lego.
I think this is a great example on how crowdsourcing/co-creation (users create projects, try to get support) mixes with open innovation (the partnership between Lego and Cuusoo). It fits well into my thinking that terms such as open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation are becoming less relevant. InShare67. Origo: A 3D Printer For Kids. Phil McKinney – Thanks but no thanks for your ideas … now please go away. Philmckinney | September 20, 2011 The corporate anti-bodies are alive and well in every organization that I’ve ever been involved with. Some people just can’t help themselves. They feel like they have the right and obligation to educate the person as to why their ideas won’t work.
By allowing these people to operate unchecked, leaders signal to the organization that new ideas will be rejected and thus innovation is not important. So what are you to do? Avoid the anti-bodies at all cost if you can. Go around them … even go silent and execute your idea as an underground project. If you are the anti-body within your organization, how can you change? Repent from your past sinsRead the 11 rules for getting alongFollow them What creative ways have you used to avoid the corporate anti-bodies? P.s. Watch and Listen: Clay Christensen Explains Disruptive Innovation. An Innovation Roadmap. A Machine That Gives Shape to Your Ideas - Graphic. Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com.
A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Fabrication. NYC BigApps Ideas. The Paradox of Innovation. Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than A Tablet | Epicenter Innovators Don't Only Dream, They Remember Their Dreams. Phil McKinney – Do we lack patience when it comes to innovation? Chinese Innovation – Lessons from the East. The Future of Light Is the LED | Magazine. Rede de Inovação. Express Your Ideas! Innovation Weblog - Trends, resources, viewpoints from Chuck Frey at InnovationTools. Innovate Your Purpose Not Just Your Product. A Highlight and Note by Gonçalo Marques from a Personal Document. 56 Reasons Why Most Corporate Innovation Initiatives Fail. Why Giving Employees Paid, Unstructured Time Pays Off – Improvisations - MIT Sloan Management Review.
Video: Free-Moving Kinect Used To Map Room And Objects In Detailed 3D.
3 Types of Innovation-Structured [Apple], Unstructured [Amazon] & Open [Google] Science fair gold medalist, 17, invents better way to search Internet. Video: World’s cheapest light bulb shines in developing regions. Forget WiFi, Connect to the Internet Through Lightbulbs - Technology. Interactive video comes online from FlixMaster - TNW Apps. Proposta sobre Lei de Inovação é aberta à consulta pública - Notícias - Secretaria da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior. Industries That Need to Change Their Business Model. The Other Side of Innovation | Innovation Excellence.
Innovation in Turbulent Times – Capgemini | Innovation Excellence. The World’s Most Innovative Companies. The 50 Most Innovative Companies. Schumpeter: The innovation machine.