Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

Chris Thoen head of Procter and Gamble’s Open Innovation business has been talking with IM about what it takes to achieve excellence in Open Innovation. This week Chris touches on staffing and the culture of Open Innovation.

Amy Radin became one of America’s first Chief Innovation Officers when Citigroup appointed her to the role in 2005. She is currently Chief Innovation officer at E*Trade Financial, the leading online discount stock brokerage. Amy talks to Innovation Management about what it takes to be a head up on innovation in a major corporation.

StartUp America is President Obama’s policy of choice to kick start jobs growth in the United States. StartUp America Partnership is a private sector initiative to help out. How closely related are they and what do they mean for innovation in America? We talked to Lesa Mitchell, VP Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation, one of the architects of the partnership.

Even companies that do not invest in design thinking do invest in designing their brand. In a new book, Brand Driven Innovation, Erik Roscam Abbing looks at how brand should be redesigned and how that helps the innovation process.

Procter and Gamble’s Connect and Develop program signalled the transition of big business from a past based on internal R&D to a future based on connectivity and openness. Connect and Develop kick-started the open innovation movement. In a revealing interview Chris Thoen, who runs P&G’s open innovation practice, tells Innovation Management about the future of P&G’s Open Innovation strategy.

Chris Bangle is one of the most influential designers of the post-war era. He took over as Chief Designer at BMW in the early 1990s and transformed both the brand and the look of cars in general, drawing admiration, and envy, from competitors like Ford. Now running his own consultancy, Bangle talks to IM about innovation from a design perspective.

It’s going to break many hearts around Europe where innovation clusters have been strongly advocated at all levels of policy making but a recent Norwegian study found that a firms international connections were far more important than local clusters. That means the future for many regions and companies lies in building those international pipelines (partnerships, ideas, possibilities) rather than relying on local cluster subsidies.

Steven Klepper, the recipient of the 2011 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, has spent all of his professional career looking at how innovation and the fate of large firms are so closely intertwined. His conclusions on how large firms, start-ups and clusters interact should be required reading for innovation managers and strategists everywhere.

The rise of business platforms is changing the rules of competition almost unnoticed. Given a bad name from customer lock-in during the 1990′s the new generation of cloud based platforms are revolutionising business.

The idea of the creative city or creative class took a back seat while the chatter among businesses and policy makers turned to innovation. Yet complexity economics tells us cities are where the bulk of innovation happens. Is it time to revisit ‘places’ as the focal point of innovation activity? A new report suggests yes but we have also to revisit what we understand by a creative city or region.

Eric Von Hippel has long been an advocate of user-led innovation but it is not always clear what user-led innovation really means. A newly released study on consumer innovation by Von Hippel reveals more than you might think. Haydn Shaughnessy delves deeper..

The discipline of innovation management is still evolving – yes technologists and scientists have always done invention and product development, and entrepreneurs know how to bend markets to their will. But a discipline to stand alongside marketing, logistics and HR, that’s new. A report from HEC Business School is a welcome overview of how that discipline is taking shape.

An EU benchmark of national innovation capabilities has the United States out in front with some European countries falling behind the emerging economies. The US Government on the other hand is deeply concerned about its innovation capability. Haydn Shaughnessy asks if the benchmarks give us a way to rethink innovation.

In an economy where many millions of social interactions create exciting but often random change, can state bodies credibly set innovation policies that fire the imagination of entrepreneurs – whatever the budget? In the third of our articles on Europe’s Innovation Union we spoke to Ann Mettler, Executive Director of think tank The Lisbon Council and asked for her take on policy and innovation.

Policy makers in the USA and EU are looking at how they can design innovation programmes that support global competitiveness. In this series we are looking at Europe’s new ‘Innovation Union’, which reflects the new growing significance of innovation in Government policy. We’ll be following up with more on US and Asian innovation thinking. In Part II of our Innovation Union series, we talked with Peter Droell, head of innovation at the European Commission.