Aberdeen Group just released a new research report that examines the differences between leaders and laggards in innovation. The study shows that leaders meet targets for new product revenues 46 percent more often than their average industry peers and that they meet launch dates 47 percent more often.The report gives an overview of the actions that innovation leaders employ to become more innovative. It is good to see that it aligns with our vision on innovation empowerment. Aberdeen calls it the Pace Model, see below. 
Author Archives: Innovation Factory
Innovation Empowerment
Tagged Innovation
Ideablob
Advanta, a credit card firm for small business, is running a big idea challenge at http://www.ideablob.com. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can submit ideas and win $10k. The first three weeks of the month each have a sprint that will deliver two sprint winners based on popular vote. In the last week of the month, these six sprint winners are joined by the two ideas that have gained most votes overall. In this last week, the winner is chosen and gets the prize. Apart from the prize to win, the ideas get reviewed and receive helpful comments that the entrepreneurs can use to improve their ideas. So even entrepreneurs that don’t win, get value from participating. Looks like a great way to get entrepreneurs starting their business, something that’s vary valuable in these economic times.
Tagged Innovation
How innovation is stimulated by the economic downturn
In this interview Harvard’s famous innovation professor Clayton Christensen argues that the economic downturn will drive innovation. His insight is that in good times, innovators get too much funding and have the chance to continue too long with innovations that eventually fail. The innovators have too much budget and time to spend before confronting the market with the innovation. In bad times, they get less funding and have to be more picky in deciding which innovations to pursue. Evenmore, the lack of resources sparks creativity and pushes the innovators to really challenge assumptions and current ways of working, thus delivering more breakthrough innovations.
Being able to stop innovation projects is one of the characteristics of successful innovative companies, and I guess Christensen is right when he argues that in hard times, companies will be more focused on selecting the right innovations. I also ran across this in my research. One research project was focused on a company that had delivered some very successful products to the market, but also experienced some big failures. The failures were costly as they were products that were introduced in many countries, incurring all marketing and sales costs, but taken out of the stores within a few months. As the successes delivered a lot of profits, they could afford do have these failures, so they didn’t have to be very selective in the innovation funnel. Our research found out that the failed innovations should have been stopped earlier in the innovation funnel, as they didn’t meet many of the selection criteria. They were not stopped however, because they were pet projects of managers and nobody dared to tell them to stop the projects.
Some companies understand that stopping innovation projects is not a shame, but is something that stimulates innovation. These companies don’t need bad times to become more innovative. Take Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt for example. In an interview with the Economist he stated his view on failures: “Please fail very quickly – so that you can try again”.
Will the economic downturn help companies to become as innovative as Google?
Tagged Innovation, Leadership
Innovation Metrics
Interesting white paper from InnovationLabs on innovation metrics. They present metrics for the entire innovation funnel. Even more, apart from quantitive metrics they give qualitative metrics and provocative questions. This helps to get some more grip on the entire scope of innovation activities.
Tagged Innovation
Effective Idea Selection
Robert Tucker has written an interesting short article about the importance of having effective idea selection criteria. One point really struck me because we often hear from our clients that their problem is not getting ideas, but having too many ideas. Tucker recognizes this too and his opinion is that in many cases companies don’t have good criteria to select ideas and therefore get stuck in heaps of half-baked incremental ideas. He stresses that idea selection is key to keeping a healthy stream of ideas. He refers to Disney, Google, GE and Amazon to show how good idea selection processes are designed. Robert Tucker will be speaking at the Innovation Leaders Summit in London.
Tagged Innovation
Easy idea generation
SCAMPER is a method to help generate ideas for innovation. It is an easy variant of the types of “analytic” idea generation methods like TRIZ and SIT. SCAMPER boils the sets of rules of TRIZ and SIT down to just 7:
- S = Substitute
- C = Combine
- A = Adapt
- M = Magnify
- P = Put to Other Uses
- E = Eliminate (or Minify)
- R = Rearrange (or Reverse)
On http://litemind.com/scamper-tool/ is a simple SCAMPER tool that helps you to get started with SCAMPER.
Tagged Innovation
Building an innovative culture
The innovationtools website published a report titled “How do you build and sustain a culture and climate for innovation and entrepreneurship?”. The three main components they distinguish are:
- Giving innovators the time and space required
- Providing the right mix of diverse people on the innovation teams
- Fostering connections and relationships
These three points align with our experience, and the good thing is that they show that any company can be innovative! The ingredients for innovation don’t have to come from outside of the organization, but are available within. Giving time to innovators and supporting them with tools and training to make sure innovation processes are effective and efficient should provide a fruitful basis for innovation in any organization.
Tagged Innovation
McKinsey survey on Web 2.0 Enterprise
Management consultant McKinsey executed a survey to assess the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools.The results of the survey, based on answers of almost 2000 respondents, provide some interesting insights.
In the first place, Enterprise 2.0 is gaining traction in more companies; the initial small pilot projects have grown into serious applications that do change the way organisations are working and business is done. As a result companies plan to spend more on Enterprise 2.0 in the next year.
Secondly, the focus is less on technology and more on application of technology. The survey reveals that the technologies of P2P and web services have decreased in usage and that applications like blogs and wikis have grown. That’s a good sign showing that users are in charge of Enterprise 2.0, which is an imperative for successful introduction and use of Enterprise 2.0. In our experience, organisations where users drive Enterprise 2.0 are far more successful than organisations where IT is in control of Enterprise 2.0.
Third interesting point is that organisations are saying that the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 asks for and leads to other ways of organizing and collaboration. It’s not the technology, but it’s the change in the way people work that delivers value of Enterprise 2.0.
That’s also why application of Enterprise 2.0 tools can help organisations to become more innovative. The collaborative, grassroots way of communication of Enterprise 2.0 can be used as an important stepping-stone toward a more open culture, which is a prerequisite for an innovative company.
Tagged Enterprise 2.0, Strategy
