Beyond Here, Sea Monsters Lie: Identifying Edges, Boundaries, and Barriers (.pdf)

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.

Sparking Growth Systematically

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

Benchmarking Innovation Best Practice

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 … [ Read more ]

Top 10 Innovation Themes

“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.”

Overcoming Innovation Barriers

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?

Missing Markets: Strategies for Exploring the World’s Biggest Neglected Business Opportunites (.pdf)

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.

Inside Innovation: Impact on Category Development

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.

Prescription In A Tough Economy: Radical Innovation

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 … [ Read more ]

Community Innovation and the Aspiring Innovator (.pdf)

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 … [ Read more ]

Innovation in all things! Developing creativity in the workplace

“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 … [ Read more ]

Qualities of an Innovator

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 … [ Read more ]

Assessing Your Organization’s Innovation Capabilities

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 … [ Read more ]

A Call to Innovation

“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. … [ Read more ]

Unlocking the Secrets of Business Innovation

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.

Finding, Examining Lead Users Push 3M to Leading Edge of Innovation

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).

Innovation 100: The Customer

“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 … [ Read more ]

Rules to Innovate By

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.

Four Kinds of Uncertainty

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

Hand in Hand

New technologies rarely replace old ones. Smart companies will create innovative hybrids.