At Innovation Factory we are doing some research on Corporate Social Responsibility (in Dutch: Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Ondernemen; MVO) and Cradle to Cradle. A very interesting and entertaining video presentation from William McDonough on “The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle” can be found on Ted.com.
If you have similar links or any other interesting input on Corporate Social Responsibility or Cradle to Cradle, please leave them in the comments.
The essential part of becoming an innovative company is getting enough ideas, being able to effectively select the good ones, and further develop them.
We advise our clients on a daily basis on ways to successfully implement idea management. And, as an Innovation Consultancy we try to constantly renew our tools and services, meaning that we also need to be effective at idea management. So we have to put our money where our mouth is.
Recently I stumbled upon Roomware, which is a project that links virtual identities of people to their real-life presence at an event. The idea is that online information about a person can be connected to his or her presence at an offline event. When I mentioned this to a few of my colleagues, their reaction was: “Nice, but what does that have to do with our innovation initiatives?” Well, let me try to explain that…
“What do you use a wiki for?” This is the question that Michael Idinopulos discusses an interesting blog article. He highlighted the following four solution areas: Collaborative Intelligence, Participatory Knowledgebase, Flexible Client Collaboration, and Business Social Networks:
I think that creating a framework with solution areas mentioned by Idinopulos is a great way to help people to promote their wiki internally. Because of the extensive possibilities it is hard to explain in one sentence, but when you present a few broad areas it is easier to communicate.
Open Innovation propagates sharing and collaboration with external parties. The architect of the term Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough, describes the following principles as being at the foundation of Open Innovation
While the term was initially very much related to IP, it has evolved; A recent valuable resource of literature on open innovation has been composed by VINNOVA, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems. It has been made available on openinnovation.nl
In practice, there are many shapes in which Open Innovation can be manifested. So how about some examples?
Last week an event called ‘Van Web2.0 naar Enterprise2.0′ took place in Zeist. Han Gerrits was chairman at the event. A list of the speakers at the event can be found at the Heliview website.
On the weblog Frankwatching.com an interesting review of the event is written. A recurring subject in this review is expectation management. A company engaging in an Enterprise 2.0 project must realise that only 1% of the community participates very often (9% contribute from time to time and 90% are lurkers). Although lurkers only pull out information, the social initiative is of value since these lurkers gather information from it. Naturally, in any Enterprise 2.0 initiative active participation should be encouraged, because that generates the most value. However, realistic targets need to be formulated concerning the level of participation.
Gary Hamel wrote a great post on how not to start innovation initiatives. The article is great fun to read but also very true. We see organizations behave in this way regularly.
Hamel and colleagues have researched over 100 cases of innovation and have found they all have in common that “successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual “lenses” that allow them to pierce the fog of “what is” in order to see the promise of “what could be.”
