Innovation Management - Creating value with innovation management.

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.

DHL Solutions & Innovations (DSI) is aiming to gather ideas and input from academics, politicians, IT experts and others, to further develop their existing concept for City Logistics in a collaborative and innovative way. With several innovations such as the Consolidation Center, the DHL Smart Truck, the Packstation (24/7 Service Point) and other “green” ideas, DHL is at the cutting edge of the market when it comes to urban logistics.

The Experience Economy is accelerated by the current global crisis according to Joe Pine. People don’t want more stuff, in this post-growth global economy people start questioning what they really value and that is experiences with others, loved ones, colleagues, friends, etc. There’s more demand for experiences and this will create job opportunities, moreover because commoditized services are being outsourced and offshored.

This week AT&T opened up the third “Foundry” collaborative center in Palo Alto. The other two are situated in Plano, Texas and Israel. The AT&T Foundries are fast-paced and collaborative environments where AT&T and technology providers team with developers to deliver the latest applications and services to customers more quickly than ever before. By doing so, it increases velocity and a broader range of innovation three times faster.

Last week, the Dutch Financial Times reported that the Netherlands moved up to the seventh place in the yearly competitiveness index by the World Economic Forum (WEF). To close the gap with the top five, social innovation needs to be tackled. Not only raising R&D budgets, but also better innovation management and work smarter.

Coca Cola is taking its Social Media efforts one step further. The brand is going to hire an agency that will mine Social Media data to understand what customers are saying about the brand and looking for. It’s an attempt to consistently understand the Social Web and benefit from it for the different brands, supply chains and so on.

At the Pebble Beach, Calif. Concours D’Elegance Ford Motor’s Lincoln brand introduced a new tool “Virtual Voice of the Customer” to test design concepts on consumers. Lincoln asked attendees of the classic car show Aug. 20-21 to look at three design concepts based on vehicles from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

This week InnoCentive, pioneer in open innovation and crowdsourcing, announced its collaboration with Popular Science, a leading science and technology publication. The purpose of the collaboration is to connect organizations that have important science, technology or engineering problems to people and communities who can best solve them.