Advanced Search

press release discusses survey of Vanderbilt's B-school faculty and MBA students ranking 5 best and worst innovations of the last century

This 23-page .pdf paper investigates how a firm can best be organized to facilitate innovation, specifically concentrating on the design of R&D resource allocation systems and the use of external technology sources. The study's key findings are that increased use of external sources of technology results in increased efficiency but decreased effectiveness and that no strong relationship was found between the use of internal markets (authors metaphor) as a resource allocation system and firm performance.

A short (8 pages) but excellent .pdf white paper by the National Commission on Entrepreneurship (NCOE) which describes the role of entrepreneurs in sparking and expanding the current U.S. economic boom. Also provides some public policy thoughts on the fostering entrepreneurship. Has many great statistics (which are compiled in the MBA Depot Market Research section).

Picking the right new technology -- and then developing and marketing it correctly -- can catapult a company ahead of its competition, expand its customer base and boost profits. For decades, top minds in research and development have relied on the S-curve theory to help them make those decisions. But research by Ashish Sood, an assistant professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, and a colleague indicate that the theory is flawed and a new approach is much needed.

When an idea is turned down -- it doesn't matter whether the innovation is in technology, marketing, or management -- most people offer one of two reasons: technology or money. Behind these two common explanations are the real reasons why ideas are killed: the four different types of uncertainty:
1. Technological uncertainty
2. Resource uncertainty
3. Market uncertainty
4. Organizational uncertainty

You can hire good people. You can ask for big ideas. But if you don't create an environment where good people can nurture and grow their big ideas, you might as well kiss your competitive advantage goodbye.

"Innovation 100: The Customer is a listing of the most innovative companies in building profitable and successful customer relationships. We offer stories analyzing the business and IT practices of some of the businesses in this year's listing. You can also view the entire list of all 100 companies ranked from one to 100. And to see how your organization's customer strategies compare against the entire class of Innovation 100 organizations, and its vertical industry peers, check out the InformationWeek and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Innovation 100: The Customer Benchmarking Tool."

3M has taken the whole "innovation company" thing one step farther. It has found an innovative way to be innovative, applying the Lead User process (developed by Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management).

Good managers make quick, sound and efficient decisions. However, they must be willing to accept ambiguity and uncertainty when dealing with creative product ideas, says Thomas Mannarelli.

There are 7 challenges that must be overcome to create market changing products. A recent book, Radical Innovation, has studied ten companies that faced these challenges including GE and IBM to learn how managers overcame common problems in innovation, such as technical and market uncertainty and a lack of resources. In this the first of a three part article we highlight selected details on how managers can capture radical new ideas and how to manage the process of radical innovation.

This is an excellent article from the author of The Innovator's Dilemma. It discusses his Resources-Processes-Values (RPV) framework for evaluating an organization's ability to innovate successfully. The author argues that most organizations focus too heavily on the most flexible variable - the resources whereas the less flexible processes and values have a greater importance on the success of new business initiatives.

Editor's Note: Read this one!

These days, the "innovation thing" is something of a no-brainer. Indeed, it seems that any company worth its low-salt lunch has identified innovation as a core competency worth developing. Who in their right mind (or is it right brain?) can deny the value of improving things? Isn't this what human beings -- those grand inventors of the microchip and the chocolate chip -- are supposed to do?

Unfortunately, innovation, unlike audits or reengineering, is not given to formulas. It is given to people -- restless, inspired, fascinated individuals with an almost cellular need for change. And while it can be supported by systems, it can never be reduced to systems. "Innovation," as Tom Peters so aptly put it, "is a messy business."

So ... if you are one of the self-chosen few willing to stop blaming your organization and start taking personal responsibility for innovating, here's a list of qualities that describe innovators.

"While many performance improvement programs have talked about innovation and the word is showing up increasingly in advertisements and mission statements, there seems to be little genuine understanding of how to build an innovation organization. We believe that the shift to innovation organizations will not come through programs, regardless of how well thought out they are. It will come by severing ties with the past. It will come through a dramatic shift in how we think about work and life in organizations. And, it will come because we have a new vision of working together in organizations. What we need is a way to proclaim this new vision and mindshift; we need a Declaration of Innovation."

"Recently, members of the Innovation Leaders Community, a group of innovation leaders from around the world (for more information: www.thinksmart.com), gathered in an online brainstorming session to generate ideas about what could be done to jumpstart grassroots innovation. They came up with about 120 ideas ... many pretty ridiculous, of course ... but many that you could do today in your organization.

Here's the best of those ideas Â… followed by some that were pretty "stupid and ridiculous"* but might stimulate some additional thinking."

"Many books and management experts have predicted a world into the next millennium of rapidly increasing change and the need for managers to be able to respond in ways that have not been previously imagined. In this article we set out a way in which both managers and trainers can act differently in order to create a creative climate within their organization."

Editor's Note: I found the authors' prescribed technique silly and difficult to envision but the introductory material on Ekvall was interesting. To read more about Ekvall's work see:
http://www.thinking.net/Creativity/creativity.html

The focus of this Just Thinking piece is that an organization implementing an innovation process needs to understand the dynamic and evolving nature of organizational behavior and culture. Too often, innovation processes fail to recognize that companies change, learn, and improve with time. As a result, the solutions are static. This Just Thinking will help to clarify how a company can migrate, over time, towards Community Innovation.

An interesting summary and framework for the issues that arose from a group gathering at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation to discuss "missing markets." The paper offers a systematic method for identifying missing markets, analyzing what would be required to provide those markets, and evaluating the consequences.

Understanding the drivers of market development and evolution is the key to marketing decision-making. Often the focus for this is restricted to price, promotion and distribution. Professor Douglas Bowman and Hubert Gatignon present some other often-ignored innovation drivers, assessing their contribution to the market and category development.

Constant innovation has become an inarguable strategy for business survival. With such a powerful and straightforward strategy, why are so many organizations struggling to survive?

"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?

To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential "innovation themes," which are repeated and proven over time."

This study highlights numerous practices that characterize highly innovative organisations. The research seems to indicate that innovation requires companies to excel along two key dimensions, namely:

1. Hard innovation: which is primarily to do with the company putting in place structures for innovation, such as innovation stage-gate methodologies, suggestion schemes, reward schemes, quantitative goals, organisational systems and procedures for interaction, physical infrastructures and resources to enhance co-operation and collaboration.
2. Soft innovation: which involves proper and effective management of the hard aspects of innovation. The soft aspects include managing the culture and climate of the organisation to create an innovation orientation and positive behaviours. The soft side of innovation requires careful management through sensitive leadership which sets the agenda for innovation and then reinforces the agenda in the behaviours of its people by signalling and reinforcing these behaviours by symbolic as well "hard" resource allocations.

The best practices defined in this research suggest that it is in finding the correct balance between soft and hard actions that innovation success is built. Too often firms stress hard aspects of innovation but neglect addressing the vague but vital soft aspects of innovation. Unfortunately implementing the hard alone yields only partial benefits which plateau after a short period. Long term and full benefits can only be accrued if the hard aspects are complemented by soft actions which provide the underlying dynamic and impetus towards innovation. Indeed it is the soft aspects that ensure that the organisation is innovative in the long term. In the end success is not a question of either or but based on a complement of actions. The identification of so called best practices in this study highlights some of the key issues that need to be addressed to create the soft-hard complement of actions to move towards innovation excellence.

How to turn innovation, often viewed as a haphazard occurrence, into a discipline

This 'Just Thinking' paper (a CBI term) is a discussion-starter for an element of the topic Strategic Exploration. It offers up four general innovation boundaries: Physical, Knowledge, Context, and Time.

A six-step guide to the promotion of corporate entrepreneurship and the exploitation of innovation.

"The key to successful breakthrough innovation lies in learning constantly from the bumpy ride.

Traditional product development races steadily along a linear track toward a pre-defined formal launch date at the finish line. At that moment - and not until that moment - will ultimate success or failure be revealed.

Effective breakthrough product development is different. The breakthrough race is around a circular track - it's an iterative rather than a linear process. Within this race, the winners, paradoxically, are the companies that can fail early and learn quickly from their mistakes. They then can come out with a product or service that incorporates this new learning."

Read on for more, including 7 Steps for Better Breakthroughs.

CIOs at established companies can help identify and foster disruptive innovation to ensure future growth in existing and emerging markets.

Conventional wisdom says to get back to basics.
Conventional wisdom says to cut costs.
Conventional wisdom is doomed.
The winners are the innovators who are making bold thinking an everyday part of doing business.

Editor's Note: The meat of this article is found in the three systemic beliefs that inhibit innovation and the four dominant innovation lenses toward the middle of the article.

It is well understood that in today's world of discontinuous change, there is no continuity without constant renewal...There are two core challenges to making innovation a deep capability in any organization. First, most companies have a very narrow idea of innovation, usually focusing just on products and services. We need to enlarge our view of innovation. Second, most companies devote much more energy to optimizing what is there than to imagining what could be. We need to create constituencies for "What Could Be."

Find a wide selection of interviews with business luminaries in our Interviews Section

---

Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. In this interview, he elaborates on his concept of shared space and it's use in fostering innovation and collaboration.

"Welcome to the 'good enough' economy, where the likelihood that a technological innovation will be taken up depends on how well it answers six critical questions."