Innovation Management - Creating value with innovation management.

An innovation may equate with the emerging of a new trend; trends may also be important for an idea to latch on to, in order to achieve the success qualifying it as an innovation.

If you were to visit a Catalan village or town festivity, celebrating something like Midsummer, you may be struck by a seemingly odd scene: people dancing around a pile of ladies’ handbags, with some small kids topping the pile…

In my August 31, 2010, blog I wrote that “TRIZ” [which I introduced] indicates that every field of technology evolves in a regular way, advancing through a series of stages, always the same and in the same sequence. …

In 1795, Napoleon Bonaparte instituted a prize for an invention that would help always provide his troops with food. The eventual result came to be canning. So while we might believe that competition in the market place is a force for innovation, competition for some prize may also work.

To the right of my first “Innovation Writ Large” announcement, you could read the flier for a column of July 2 “Discover new possibilities with Reverse Innovation” by my IM colleague Gunjan Bhardwaj. This – Reverse Innovation – is a theme that I would like to return to, not because there was anything wrong with that contribution but rather the, well, reverse: I’d propose further emphasizing its importance and future potential.

The theme headlined, often abbreviated IPR, could provide almost unlimited contents, so my essay will necessarily just attempt to indicate some interesting resources in a field not without controversy.

My blog will be a regular InnovationManagement.se feature, every fortnight or so introducing a particular theme with relevance to innovation, furthermore pointing to some interesting conferences, web sites, or alike, and also introducing a ‘law’ of potential interest.

The indulgent reader of my columns has already met the concepts of mesovation and exovation, and now I’m going to introduce yet another neologism: metovation. Meto- in metovation stems from the prefix meta- where I for easier pronunciation exchanged o for a. Meta is of Greek language origin and stands for the next higher level of abstraction.

Who would be searching for failure? Failures just happen, though we always hope to avoid them. A vile thing, a vile word, no? Read more in this weeks’ column by Bengt-Arne Vedin, PhD and Professor emeritus in innovation management. And why not joining in helping Bengt-Arne improving the article by joining the discussion?

“It is unlikely that you have ever met the concept of exovation before; I invented it in April 2008. Invented? Yes, indeed – even if a Google search obtains a couple hundred hits; but they have nothing to do with the concept as I have defined it. You will see, presently.” Read more in this weeks´ column by Bengt-Arne Vedin, PhD and Professor emeritus in innovation management.

All too often, simplifications just lead us astray. Is taking radical as the opposite of incremental or in small steps one such contrived simplification – and one that risks misleading us? This weeks´ column is written by Bengt-Arne Vedin, PhD and Professor emeritus in innovation management..