General Mills OpenInnovation Beyond our walls, innovators like you might have just what we need to bring healthy and flavorful food to the world. At General Mills, we believe that there is a great opportunity for us to enhance and accelerate our innovation efforts by teaming up with world-class innovators from outside of the company. To facilitate this effort, we created the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-WIN) to actively seek partners who can help us deliver breakthrough innovation in the following categories: Products - New products that fit within a General Mills brand or solve a customer need. Packaging- Novel packaging technologies or new, consumer-friendly formats. Processes - Improvements to quality, efficiency and profitability. Ingredients - New ingredients to enhance taste, texture, quality or health benefits. Technologies- Enabling food technologies. Digital- Emerging digital marketing technologies.
innovation playground Idris Mootee: Three Secret Weapons Of Inno Welcome to the 24hr Innovation Marathon! That’s right! This post is part of “My Half Time Pep Talk for 2009,” a collection of posts about innovation on a variety of blogs, as part of the Board of Innovation’s 24 Hours of Innovation event started 3am May15 (Central time) to 3am May16. 2009 marks the 27th (correction not 25th) anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence (1982) by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Their ideas shaped new management thinking for more than two decades and inspired many young managers. Peters’ advice to companies is “Strive for Strangeness”: Creating a portfolio of the weird and encouraging "freaks" to flourish in the company will help ensure the steady stream of innovative ideas necessary to survive in a hyper-competitive international business environment. When the Economist called innovation the “industrial religion of the 21st century.” Does it matter which innovation schools you organization decides to follow, there is no one best way to do it.
Life 2.0: Golden Rules from Business Visionaries Here's a transcript of an article in Business 2.0 where they asked 30 business visionaries, collectively worth over $70 billion, what single philosophy they swear by more than any other -- in business, life, or both. Here are the secrets of their success. They are a few golden nuggets in here. Surround Yourself With People Smarter Than You Chris Albrecht, CEO, Home Box OfficeSurround yourself with people smarter than you and be comfortable with that. I went to a high school for gifted students and went from being one of the smartest kids in the class to being near the bottom of the pack. I got very comfortable with being in that situation and realizing how much I could learn from people who are as smart as or smarter than I am. George Steinbrenner, owner, New York Yankees This is a rule that my late father, Henry George Steinbrenner II, taught me when I was a young man. Reinvent Yourself. Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.
Agility Innovation Specialists Blogging Innovation » The Innovation Gap – Leaders versus Teams It strikes me regularly that senior executives of many firms underestimate the insights and abilities of their companies. I guess that many of us grow up with a backward-looking preference. We prefer to remember how things were “when we were there” and expect those attributes and features to remain the same. For most of us, the people we worked with and the companies we worked for are still locked in the past, unbending and unchanging. I’m stealing a bit from Seth Godin’s recent post about “senior management“. Most large organizations are built to optimize a set of predictable processes which support and maintain a given set of products or services. One reason to avoid innovation is this concept of “brittleness”. This thinking, however, assumes that most firms are very brittle – unwilling and unable to change, unwilling to accept new ideas, unable to address new opportunities or new markets. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say that if “Mr.
Why Big Companies Need Small Companies in their Open Innovation Ecosystem Corporations that are taking the lead in open innovation are hoping to gain an advantage over their competitors as they will get access to a more diverse inflow of opportunities, which can lead to faster and better innovation. Specifically, as they look toward smaller companies to bring within the orbit of their open innovation program, corporations understand that small companies bring these advantages to the table: • Small companies often are at the leading edge of breakthrough or disruptive innovation. • Small companies can take risks that large companies can’t afford to take because the bigger entities have to protect and defend their established core business operations. • Smaller companies are often closer to the markets they serve than large corporations are to their markets. • The approach and mindset of those operating in small businesses can provide a breath of fresh air to large corporations that are set in their ways, bound by tradition and afraid of change. inShare70
Inventive online resources for inventors | Webware Last week, I received an e-mail asking if I had ever taken a look at sites and services for inventors. I hadn't. And judging by the size of those sites' communities, I'm guessing that most other folks haven't, either. Web sites Incuby Incuby is an online community designed for inventors who want to get the word out about their inventions. You can then start searching for other inventions. InventBay InventBay enables inventors to list their products to target investors who might want to bring those products to store shelves. When you sign up for InventBay and list your product, the company requires a seven-day period to review your invention before it's placed on the site. InventNow InventNow is a really great idea. InvenTube InvenTube is a place where inventors and investors can work together to make a product a success. The hope is that InvenTube users who own companies or want to invest in your product will like what they see and start working with you. Mobile apps My top 3 1. 2. 3.
Social computation and creativity » Blog Archive » Problems of b Recently there had been a lot of discussion about Yahoo and big companies in connection to the Peanut Butter Manifesto. The manifesto was written for Yahoo, but it might have influenced Google as well (see my previous post). Apparently, the problems identified in the manifesto are common to any large organization. However, the ideas proposed in the manifesto to solve those problems are in no way revolutionary and were “talked” about for a long time as Yumio Saneyoshi noted in his blog. Yumio suggests its not the org structure but the actual leaders who set the tone of an organization. In my opinion, making heads roll is not the only solution to the big-company problems. Consider Wikipedia as an example. However, the org structure can be determined by the social software even in a larger extent.
From Product Development Manager to Chief Innovation Officer Do large companies need a Chief Innovation Officer? First they need to think more clearly about the range of issues they can innovate their way through and those that they cannot. The Need Increasing regulations, management systems, business processes and efficiency initiatives in organizations are becoming less flexible than their knowledge and resources. That means every organization needs to create new organizational space to facilitate product, service and experience innovation on a global scale. Often organizations duck the innovation imperative with specious arguments – I can’t innovate because I am in a regulated industry. The process of innovation in corporations can also benefit from the 24 hour open innovation network, which essentially opens ideation to wide beyond the product development function. Life gets more complicated when a product opportunity spans across industries and where businesses unite. Responsibilities Is there is need for a Chief Innovation Officer?