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.

To be upfront about where we stand, yes – we are great supporters of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd for many pursuits – for citizen engagement, open innovation, or crowdfunding. That said, we realize that it’s important to be aware of the fact that there are risks to consider. This article is a response to the concerns raised by people we meet along an organization’s path of considering crowdsourcing to fulfill a particular need for their organization or their constituents.

In this interview, award winning Jean-Baptiste Rubens – currently Head of Procurement Innovation at Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods) – describes the journey his team embarked on when realizing they were not extracting the maximum value from their suppliers. By a deliberate process where R&D needs were rationalized and dispatched to selected suppliers, the Procurement team was able to direct supplier innovation from punctual dispersed activities, to highly coordinated projects that had impact transversally across the company.

Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the “super seven” that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas.

Do you ever find that distractions get in the way of your creative thinking time? Is your mind buzzing, heading off in many different directions, sapping your energy for brainstorming? Tom Wujec, author of Five Star Mind: Games & Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity & Imagination, offers a clever solution to this common problem.

Open Innovation relies on collaboration to achieve success. To determine which firm is the best suited to be an innovation partner, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) should consider using an approach modeled on the “Want, Find, Get, Manage” methodology developed by Alliance Management Group (AMG). Because of their unique characteristics, broadly summarized as limited resources,SMEs should substitute “want, find and get” with “need, know and negotiate.” Capable and stable management remains a constant.

Despite a detailed process with countless hours of work, and sincere efforts to take a longer-term, strategic look at where to play and how to win, many businesses fail to anticipate fundamental shifts that should cause them to rethink their entire business model. The results are often disastrous – too many businesses end up on life support. This article presents a new concept called “Competitive Fingerprints” that will allow readers to anticipate shifts and adapt their business model to capitalize on future market realities.

The world we live in is changing at a dizzying rate and sectors including energy, technology, entertainment, communications, finance, sports, manufacturing and engineering are all experiencing shifts on a seismic scale. Many of the innovative advances of the past ten years, from smart phones to digital cameras have become commoditised and creativity has become the currency of success. In this article author Matthew Griffin shows how large and small organisations alike can build lean, agile, high performance innovations teams and bridge any shift successfully.

While most of the world’s airlines and markets suffer low growth rates, Asia stands out with growth rates of 9% in 2012. Asia is one of the most competitive aviation markets with 75% of routes serviced by 3 or more carriers. Seven of the ten busiest global air routes are in Asia.

Althoughplagued with mixed opinions that are influenced by mythology surrounding the investment industry, corporate venturing isfinally resurfacing as an important component of the corporate innovation toolbox. As companies reassess the contribution that corporate venturing can make to their innovation objectives, it is critical that the fundamentals of corporate venturing are understood. Thisarticle addresses a number of important points to consider when applying corporate venturing in a global innovation strategy.

To succeed in a fast-paced competitive global economy, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) are increasingly adopting Open Innovation (OI) management strategies. A lack of resources, however, frequently requires SMEs to implement OI strategies on their own without the assistance of a management strategy professional. This article offers clear, do-it-yourself steps to initiate an OI program successfully within an SME.

Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?

Innovation is often more about combining what is already there than reinventing the wheel in a creative manner. In this article you will learn how to apply solutions from other industries to your problem at hand by using… metaphors. This method I am about to present is called Metaphor Safari and is based on professor Ikujiro Nonaka’s theory on knowledge management.

All too often we see companies coming to us with a new technological advancement that they are very excited about. Sadly, having a new technology does not guarantee a winning innovation. One needs to work hard at the front end to understand what the consumer needs and how the current market offer isn’t meeting those needs. Only against this backdrop can we hope to bring an idea to market that will be truly disruptive. The following article explains.