Innovation Management - Creating value with innovation management.

The success of an organization’s idea management program is at the mercy of its supporters – the employees. The innovation team and top management must effectively communicate their goals to employees so they understand what’s expected of them and feel confident that their ideas will be taken seriously. Enno Scholz walks us through this communication process.

Living Well Collaborative is a new player in the innovation game and a sign of what’s to come – downstream innovation management by and on behalf of users, interacting with academics and industry, jointly, to fashion the future. Deborah Mills-Scofield tunes into Living Well..

What can design really teach business leaders about how to run their organizations? And where does it fit into the ever-evolving lexicon around innovation? Nicole Chen sketches out the top four values that business leaders should adopt from design thinking.

New approaches to innovation like open innovation and reverse innovation have little value if employees don’t develop their ability to work in innovative environments. Flavour Days is one small step along that route for Ericsson. Annu Dispenza descrbes how Falvour Days came about and what they mean to Ericsson.

Henry Chesbrough continues to be an influential voice in open innovation. Paul Hobcraft caught up with him on a recent trip to Denmark – and sought clarity on Henry’s latest work in open service innovation.

A while ago the IT service vendor Logica opened a centre focused on innovation at its office in Nacka Strand, Stockholm. The centre, called Spark Innovation Centre, is one component in Logica’s work on innovation management and this centre in particular focuses on the area of what is called the Next Generation Workplace.

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.

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.

As innovation becomes a prevalent activity in organizations is it time to rethink how we approach the culture of innovative people? Deborah Mills-Scofield who previously worked with Bell Labs and now consults on innovations practice, argues we need a return to timeless values if we are going to make innovation sustainable.

Extending the principles of open innovation to the public sector is a particularly important transition. Public bodies are significant spenders on products and services and yet are often distant from the most dynamic processes in our economy. Dennis Hilgers and Frank Piller look at the wider benefits of an open public service in an extended web article downloadable on Innovation Management. The authors raise some of the most important issues below.

Building innovation management as a discipline requires us to take a closer look at the hurdles innovative firms face as they develop new products, services and partnerships but also at how those firms integrate the learnings from making tough choices. Andrew Gaule takes a look at building innovation culture as we manage through the stress points.

As globalization of the world economy continues and accelerates, we are beginning a process of fundamental change in organizational design that will take us to configurations we cannot yet fully imagine. However, we can already see enough to identify major opportunities for organizations that want to exploit the benefits of these changes, even as they unfold.

This is the forth part in a series of articles that take the need of innovation under the loop and share some of the imperatives, must haves if you will, to create and sustain “NEW” in business or organizations. This article focuses on the need for ownership, as all successful innovations need a champion within the organization.

According to the last INSEAD Global Innovation Index 2009-2010, all South American countries are ranked below the 40th position. To improve the innovation situation in the region there are three main focus areas to be addressed: encouraging a culture of collaboration and the use of social media, encouraging intrapreneurs, and to introduce Management 2.0. Other key issues are Internet penetration and the Enterprise 2.0 concept.

The culture of innovation can mean many things. Most obviously it can refer to how a company creates an innovative culture, which is different from being in an innovation culture. I want to look at how innovative cultures intersect, and how important this is for what companies can achieve. The two concepts I want to introduce are: positive and negative equity in innovation cultures. How do you create the former and shed the latter?