Innovation Management - Creating value with innovation management.

The figures are clear, Emailvision’s survey shows that just 6,2% of the marketers are using social media to gain insights into customer preferences. According to a study by the Chartered Institute of Marketing only 20% of marketers use Facebook for market research. This means not fully utilizing the opportunities of social media and their data. Social media can provide an unparalled scale of real-time data, help identify unmediated consumer opinion and competitor perceptions or offer the ability to connect with those ‘creative consumers’ to co-create the solution with and strategically embed the outside-in perspective in the organization.

DSM has recently been in the news twice. One occassion due the launch of an open innovation contest that challenges designers and creative thinkers to develop high-quality sports equipment using the company’s own Arnitel® Eco material. The other occassion because the American ethanol producer POET and DSM announced a joint venture to demonstrate commercial cellulosic bio-ethanol production and license the technology by 2013. On top of this news, Deloitte and VNCI published a report on the state of the chemical industry in the Netherlands where DSM is headquartered.

This concludes the survey by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the global community of information professionals, authored by Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business and the AIIM Task Force on Social Business and Innovation.

Recently McKinsey published two articles on open innovation. One of them focuses on the business risks, the other on the usage of social technologies for open innovation. With regard to the latter, McKinsey found that “nearly two-thirds of the companies around the world that adopt a social-technology platform aim to collaborate beyond their own walls to share ideas and information with customers and suppliers.”

The University of Cambridge has partnered up with global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company in an active collaboration programme helping to find and develop potential new medicines, particularly in the areas of greatest need. Gianluigi Cuccureddu comments on the challenges and possibilities of the initiative.

A new research by Accenture finds that customers returning electronic devices will cost U.S. electronics retailers and manufacturers about $17 billion this year, an increase of about 21% from 2007. These costs include receiving, assessing, repairing, reboxing, restocking and reselling returned products.

The European Commission (EC) has launched a new open data strategy that will see a vast number of datasets owned by public authorities released to the public. The EC anticipates that the data will see businesses make money from new smart phone apps that may include maps, real-time traffic information or price comparison tools for example. The strategy is expected to boost to the EU’s economy by €40 billion each year.

The McKinsey Institute published the results of their fifth annual survey on how organizations use social technologies, it surveyed 4,200 executives to understand the developments and progress throughout the years and benefits of these social technology applications. They are being deployed for the purpose of process enhancements and operations. Secondly they’re being used to find new growth opportunities. Surprisingly, a large percentage of organizations did not maintain the benefits of using social technologies that they had achieved earlier.

The Dutch Financial Times published an article about how intangible assets are the most important value-determining factor of an organization, however investments, innovation and attention to these assets lack. This is contradicting but shows the challenge as well, because more than 75 percent of the average market value is from intangible assets. The challenge is that these aren’t quantified in financial metrics. Intangible assets consists of human-, organizational- and information capital.

Napkin Labs and Passenger were in the news this week by announcing their platforms that enable co-innovation and research on a bigger and faster scale. Online co-creation technology firm Napkin Labs launched a free app to run on Facebook. Passenger on the other hand has developed a mobile community app that increases member engagement and accelerates the research response.

Before getting to this stage, 44% of organizations say the primary barriers to enterprise-wide analytics adoption are cultural. IBM Institute for Business Value and MIT Sloan Management review released research based on a survey of more than 4,500 business leaders from more than 120 countries and a variety of industries.

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is setting up a research centre in India under its @WalmartLabs to develop its next generation of innovations that impact shopping behavior and global e-commerce business. These new innovations will help eliminate boundaries between brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce to give shoppers a seamless experience anywhere and on any device.

Since October 26th the marketers of the Savoury-cluster (Unox, Knorr, Bertolli, Conimex and Cup-a-Soup) are interacting on Facebook with hundred consumers for three months. Unilever’s marketers talk about consumer eating habits, cooking- and buying behavior. They also research what consumers think of their products, brands and advertising.

Sometimes, talking about new ways of approaching business benefits from looking at some of the world’s oldest ways of doing business. Biomimicry is a practical methodology to solve problems by looking to nature. Learn more from some examples of biomimicry on social media and co-creation.

At the heart of the innovation process is the search for new ideas and market opportunities with commercial value. With so much on the line, companies are increasingly turning to an open innovation model built on external partnerships. NineSigma and Caliper have developed a new Collaborative Innovation Development Program to ensure that innovation leaders and managers are well-suited for their roles, and know how to bring out the best in their teams.