One of the greatest challenges facing innovation professionals is to find the right approach to a given innovation problem. Whether that’s instilling the innovation mojo in a large corporation or simply helping teams become more innovative, the ways to do this seem to be more of an art than a science. However, during the last ten years there has been a strong push to turn this art form into more of a science.
In the first part of a 3-part article series innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Integrative Innovation’s Ralph-Christian Ohr worked out why successful firms need to balance radical and incremental innovation. They introduced the concept of organizational ambidexterity as an appropriate way for simultaneously conducting exploration and exploitation, the two paradigms behind radical and incremental innovation.This second part shows some best practice examples of how the most innovative firms are setting up organizational ambidexterity.
A couple of years ago, it seemed that everybody in the external innovation business aspired to be "partner of choice." That is, they wanted to be the company that external partners would preferentially approach with unsolicited new opportunities. Michael Fruhling is pleased to report that a number of companies have really stepped up their external partnering "game."
Ken Klimpel, Colgate Palmolive's Worldwide Director of External Innovation and Outreach shares his perspective on some aspects of the approach he and his company take to drive their open innovation successes.
Copycat innovation, the act of adapting a solution that has been used successful in another industry or profession, is a more reliable, affordable route to innovation, suggests Dr. Yew Kam Keong, Ph.D.
Part two in a series of articles by Robert Brands discusses the need and importance of taking risks to achieve successful innovations. Since the high failure rate, organizations pursuing the practice of Innovation must have a tolerance for failure. The material is based on 25 years of hands on experience in the innovation space and the recently published book “Robert's Rules of innovation”.
Best practices transferred and applied without contextual knowledge can be dangerous, and is as much use as a chocolate teapot.
There has been a shift from the emphasis on what people called the “information value chain” to “knowledge value chain” for quite some time. The environments are shrewd and unpredictable in this world of growing competition and rapid technological progress. The information value chain just served as a database of “best practices” whereas “knowledge value chain” emphasizes on the active sense making of human beings handling business.
