As founding partner of Creative City Lab, Innovation Factory is present at the Creative event at Pakhuis de Zwijger.
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Young Innovatives meet-ups
After the successful launch of the Innovation Managers Network, the young professionals at Innovation Factory launched the Young Innovatives network. Every last friday of the month an open coffee meet-up will take place at a changing (but certainly innovative) location. All information regarding the meet-ups can be found at the Young Innovatives LinkedIn Group.
Innovation Factory China
On September 4th, Li Kaifu, Google’s vice president and Greater China CEO, officially announced he would resign from Google. He will be starting the “Innovation Factory”, an entrepreneurial platform for young people. He will start of having funds of 800 million Yuan (a little over 80 million Euros).
The project’s investors include the founder of video site YouTube, Lenovo Holdings president Liu Chuanzhi, and WI Harper Group.
We congratulate him with the great choice of name and wish him well with this remarkable initiative.
Signed,
Innovation Factory in the Netherlands
Tagged Innovation Factory
Innovation in a time of recession (part two)
The current financial crisis affects virtually every organisation to some extent and as a result less investments are being made. Actually, cost efficiency is a term that is mentioned a lot lately. Therefore, people question whether innovation will be high on the agenda. I dare to argue that it should be, otherwise these organisations will fall behind. This blog post is the second of two about innovation in a time of recession, and specifically focusses on the combination of innovation and cost efficiency. The first post was about innovation and strategic agility in times of recession.
Sales of innovative products in the Great Depression
In a blog post, written on the Innovate on Purpose blog, a comparison is made between the recent recession and the Great Depression. The writer quotes a report “Collateral Damage” released by the Boston Consulting Group. The report states that industries with highly innovative products withstood the Great Depression fairly well. An example is given in the form of the sales figures of refrigerators, considered an innovative product at the time, which grew by 30% from 1929 to 1933. You can grant this to the desire to be an early adopter or the fact that over time refrigerators save money by keeping food fresher, or a number of other attributes. But in the end, people were spending money on innovative products and services in truly bad economic times. To relate this with the recent recession, the winning combination would be to strive for innovative products and services that let consumers save money.
Cost saving idea challenges
Innovation is not only about new products and services, but also about new processes. A process innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method. First of all, idea generation focused on process innovation often generates ideas that cut costs. So the combination of innovation and cost efficiency can be brought together by idea challenges focussed on cost savings. In times when budgets are being cut back, this aspect of innovation can be very helpful. Secondly, when striving for a truly innovative environment it is very important that everybody in the organisation participates. This creates a situation where a small contribution by all, means a big difference at the bottom-line.
Involving all employees in a cost saving idea challenge therefore seems to create a double-win: an innovative organisation and ideas for cost savings.
Tagged Innovation, Strategy
Innovation and strategic agility in a time of recession
The current financial crisis is affecting virtually every organisation to some extent and as a result fewer investments are being made. Actually, cost efficiency is a term that we hear mentioned a lot lately. Therefore, people question whether innovation will be high on the agenda. I dare to argue that it should be, otherwise these organisations will fall behind. This blog post is the first of two about innovation in a time of recession, and specifically focusses on innovation and strategic agility.
Innovation and strategic agility
In a previous post on the Innovation Playground blog, the author states that the best investment you can make right now is to invest in the innovation capability of your organisation and reorganise to become an agile corporation. But what actually is strategic agility? On the website www.strategicagility.com the concept is defined as follows:
“The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company.”
Strategic agility is already important in normal economic times, but even more so in difficult times. Because the environment changes quickly and organisations have to adjust to them. In times of high economic growth not much drive exists to change the organisation, but in difficult economic times one simply needs to change. Lower budgets make people more creative.
How to become more strategically agile?
According to the authors of the book Fast Strategy, three essential capabilities need to be in place to be strategically agile: strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly) and collective commitment (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions –fast, without being bogged in “win-lose” politics at the top). In the end, a lot of companies have overcapacity because of a shrinking production. Being agile involves resource fluidity: being able to put that overcapacity to use in a different way.
Act now!
This is the right time to use the overcapacity for innovation purposes. If you invest wisely to become more innovative and agile, your organisation will have a competitive advantage when the economy turns around.
Tagged Innovation, Out Of The Box, SIT, Workshop
Green made easy
The Canadian company Ecobee launched a thermostat that can be controlled trough the internet.
“The ecobee Smart Thermostat is a 7-day programmable thermostat designed to help you conserve energy, save money and reduce your environmental impact. The ecobee Smart Thermostat provides ease and flexibility in the management of your home environment and comfort.”
In itself the Ecobee isn’t a great example of ‘out off the box’ thinking, but is a nice SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) example. Specifically this is an example of the ‘dividing’ exercise where the functions of a product are split to see if they add value in that way. In this case the controls are taken of the thermostat and offered in a different way (the web). Another example of ‘dividing’ would be the remote control of televisions.
SIT is very powerful as it forces you to think in ways you are not used to leading to very creative ideas. The SIT workshops we run with our clients always lead to ideas that are pursued further. Give it a try!
Tagged Innovation, Out Of The Box, SIT, Workshop
New Social Platform ‘Cubetree’
This week Cubetree launched. Cubetree is the next generation Social Platform for the enterprise. With our team of enterprise social media implementation experts we put it through a quick test. Cubetree is a very powerful platform that has most functionality you would want in an enterprise setting. If you want to get a feel for where this industry is heading, take a look. It really does all the social stuff!
Just to name a few things: sharing documents, sharing links, wiki’s, sharing photo’s, setting goals for yourself and others, etc, etc. Integration with Google Calender, Salesforce, Webex, Twitter, Tripit, Google Docs, Google Reader, etc etc. Yes, very impressive.
However, after an hour we stopped using Cubetree because it just generates too many updates. We tested with 3 people and were just completely overwhelmed by the updates. We imagined what would happen if 15 more colleagues would partake and shivered. For now we are going back to using Yammer for our internal communication, and wiki’s and Google Docs for collaboration. If Cubetree solves this issue, we’ll give it another go and potentially implement it at clients.
Tagged Innovation, social platform
Crowdsourcing example
In the book “The wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki a very clear example is given which proofs the wisdom of a crowd. I want to share this example as it is very simple. A British scientist, named Francis Galton, had little faith in the intelligence of the average person. He wanted to prove that the average voter within a group was capable of very little.
Tagged Community management, crowdsourcing, Innovation
Hair clippings to clean up oil spills
On Springwise I ran in to a posting about a hairdresser clearly connecting dots outside his box. I would like to share it with you.
“While watching the coverage of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, hair stylist Phil McCrory was struck by how rapidly otters’ fur absorbed oil. He soon began testing how much oil he could absorb with the cast-off clippings from his salon, and voilà, the Oil Spill Hair Mat was created. McCrory teamed up with the environmentally-driven fiscal sponsor Matter of Trust, and set up shop in a San Francis warehouse. Following the hair mat’s inception in 2000, thousands of hair salons now donate their excess hair to Matter of Trust to be recycled into absorbent mats. And with salons collecting on average one pound a day, that’s a lot of hair mats.
Hairdressers signing up as donors are asked to cover shipping costs, compensated by the happy knowledge that they’re helping clean up oil spills. The program also accepts other natural fibres such as dog fur from groomers, horse hair, waste wool, and even nylon stockings that can be filled with hair and used to contain spills.”
Tagged Innovation, Out Of The Box
Open Innovation at Nestle
I came across a summary of a speech Helmut Traitler, Vice President for Innovation Partnerships at Nestle gave at an Open Innovation Forum in Cambridge. It is a beautiful example of a company purposely innovating and I have nothing to add to Saul Kaplan’s account of the presentation.
“Embracing open innovation and new business models Nestle clearly recognizes that to achieve its growth objective it must extend its internal capabilities to establish a large number of strategic partnering relationships. It has embraced open innovation and works aggressively with strategic partners to co-create significant new market and product opportunities. Worldwide, Nestle employs approximate 5000 people in 24 R&D centers and over 250 application groups. It extends its reach by tapping into the technologies and expertise of more than a million researchers around the world.
Importance of strategic focus within target benefit areas Nestle has a very clear framework to screen new opportunities. It has identified target benefit areas that relate to nutrition, compliance and quality, and taste. In order for any idea to be pursued it must be strategically aligned with one of the identified target benefit areas.
Tagged Culture, Innovation, Open Innovation
