Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

Thanks to loads of compelling research studies and best practice cases in open innovation (OI) carried out over the last decade, several companies nowadays begin to embrace and partially apply the new principles and methods OI offers. However, when managing open innovation at the project level, even experienced managers still go blank at the question: how to assess, control, and measure the performance of these activities? In this series of articles, we will address the above issue by discussing a general framework for an open innovation performance measurement system (Part 1). Given this framework, a metricsbased management toolkit will be presented that provides a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific set of OI methods that demonstrates the key results of our Open Innovation KPI 2012 Study (Part 2).

In the world of hyper-innovation every company needs to address the unknown. Idris Mootee of Idea Couture takes a look at white space mapping, a tool for overcoming your fears.

As innovation becomes an important skill set, large organizations will seek to obtain training for their employees. We stand on the brink of an innovation training “land rush” with few rules and little information to identify the best programs. Evaluating an innovation training program is critical. Assess programs based on their depth, the experience of the trainers, the referenced body of knowledge and the inclusion of practical examples and hands-on exercises. Ignore certifications, because no standard exists.

Virtual reality is back with better graphics, better hardware, and more applications. Several technologies will soon be released to the general market to further immerse mainstream users in their digital experiences while expanding the applications of virtual reality.

How can a companies’ ability to innovate be improved?All innovation activity can be traced back to the behavior of employees. That makes the employee the center point of attention, if you want to improve your innovation ability. This article is built around the question: Which personal abilities and traits as well as organizational culture enable an employee to be innovative?

“Innovate or die,” heralds the Digital Age. The wise leader, mindful of the limits of the latter, embraces the practice of collaborative innovation as a way for their organization to pursue the former. Organizations, too, have professional facilitators on staff and on call. Working as an adjunct to the human resources function, they have remained largely absent from the dialogue around the practice. Innovation happens elsewhere.

Synthetic biology moves us from reading to writing DNA, allowing us to design biological systems from scratch for any number of applications. Its capabilities are becoming clearer, its first products and processes emerging. Synthetic biology’s reach already extends from reducing our dependence on oil to transforming how we develop medicines and food crops. It is being heralded as the next big thing; whether it fulfils that expectation remains to be seen. It will require collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches to development, application and regulation. Interesting times ahead!

If you want to innovate with a process or a service then try focusing on this word – rearrange. Describe your current process as a series of steps. Draw them out as a block diagram. Now try moving the blocks around and see where this leads.

Business is changing. To be successful in the twenty-first century, businesses in developed economies must connect with people’s emotions. This move towards greater emotional intelligence explains why “storytelling” has become so fashionable in marketing and therefore, in the following article, we will explain how you can bring storytelling into your innovation work. The aim:helping you create novel concepts that also connect emotionally.

In its latest Global Innovation Excellence Study Arthur D. Little provides hard evidence on which innovation practices separate top innovators from others within and across a wide range of industries. The study zooms in on the relationship between innovation success – based on impact of innovation – and innovation performance – based on a comprehensive framework which breaks down innovation activity into different areas and looks at adoption of best practices in each – and is available as an online toolkit. The toolkit is readily accessible and provides valuable feedback on innovation performance as measured against peers, including opportunities for improvement.

The majority of managers who say that their company’s sustainability activities have added to profits also say that sustainability has led to business model change. What connects corporate sustainability with business profits? According to our 2012 global executive survey on sustainability, an important factor is business model innovation. Managers who say that their company’s sustainability activities have added to the company’s profits are more than twice as likely to say that sustainability has caused their organization to change their business model than not.

As innovative brands acknowledge that content is the currency they trade for consumer attention, the big question is how best to leverage this content. To date out-of-home media to shelf talkers have relied on consumers spending a certain degree of time and effort ‘grabbing’ their content. Near Field Communication (NFC) marketing is about to change that as it introduces a disruptive new way of grabbing and sharing content, with a simple tap of technology.

In his book No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world, author Alan Moore argues that humanity shifts gear when it demands fundamental change to its real world circumstances and that this moment stands as a turning point in the collective approach to the organisation of the economy and society as a whole. This deeply thought provoking work is relevant for innovation management professionals in all industries, as it: challenges how we think innovation gets done, and then offers up new viable alternatives; argues that innovation can be accelerated and costs reduced; demonstrates that we need a new vocabulary to describe non-linear innovation and finally, explains how innovation can also help build a more regenerative world.

One of the challenges leaders face in times of uncertainty and rapid change is helping senior managers to engage in bigger-picture thinking. To enable this process, a growing number of companies are creating “decision rooms” – dedicated areas that help them visualize challenges and opportunities from a number of perspectives and make better decisions.

Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.