The Problem With Australian Innovation Programs: and Lessons for Other Countries (Part 2 in series)

Over the past few months I have been spending time with a range of Australian companies, getting to better understand their business models and approaches to innovation. While there is plenty of good news for Australian businesses and their innovation practices (see my previous article), there is a justified sense of concern around maintaining sustained, robust growth in the face of digital and exponential disruption.

What the Australian Economy Gets Right About Innovation; and Lessons for Other Countries (Part 1 in series)

Over the past few months I have been spending time with a range of Australian companies, getting to better understand their business models and approaches to innovation. After working with US / European organizations for many years, it’s been refreshing to see the actions and impact of innovation in this market.

Hold Innovation & Mobilize National Entrepreneurialism

We are over flooded with massive innovation lacking commercialization; we have qualifications, certifications and degrees but seriously lacking directions; we have incubators and accelerators exhausted like real estate projects…we have make-believe economical development games but the real progress is not there. So what else we need?

How to Get Your Innovative Idea off the Ground in the Current Economic Climate

Incredibly, business confidence in the UK is continuing to rise, despite the spectre of Brexit and its potential implications on citizens. Many experts have attribute this to the growth of the manufacturing sector, which recorded a Credit Manager's Index (CMI) score of 62.7 during the first quarter of 2017 and a 1.5% increase from the previous quarter. This hints at significant growth potential for product-oriented firms, which are currently able to increase exports due to a more competitively priced (and fundamentally weaker) pound.

Innovation, Suffocation & Trump Nation

Innovation at best is like watering a nice healthy plant, making it grow and blossom; however, watering without the plant is just getting the dirt wet. Nothing happens. Currently, all over the world and with more than 100 major innovation themed events yearly, complete with great photo opportunities for local and national leadership, most nations have little to show for these super expensive efforts. It seems that we talk a lot about innovation and find ourselves stuck in the suffocation of great ideas. And, suddenly the Trump nation erupts on a high note!

The Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017

The Global Competitiveness Report assesses the competitiveness landscape of 138 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity. Switzerland, Singapore and the United States remain the three world’s most competitive economies.

Innovation that Matters: Tomorrow’s Winning Cities

Innovation that Matters examines and ranks 25 cities’ readiness to capitalize on the inevitable shift to a digital economy. It carves out critical trends every U.S. city leader can learn from and offers recommendations local leaders can adopt to strengthen their region’s digital competitiveness.

Follow the Crowd or Create the Marketplace

It’s follow my leader time for the world’s stock markets. Concerns over the state of the Chinese economy have seen markets plunge into freefall, only for some to bounce upwards again a few hours later. At the time of writing, markets are still in flux with analysts divided on the eventual outcome.

Innovation: Force Fields for Change

This article relates selected multidirectional patterns of change—“force fields”—in the business environment to innovation strategy within the context of Zen philosophical principles. Three force fields are selected for brief evaluation: 1) domestic vs. global markets, 2) economic growth vs. environmental quality, and 3) entrepreneurs vs. customer base. Given the omnipresence of force fields in the 21st century, businesses should maintain flexible structures for innovating both incrementally and radically. They also need to engage in collaboration at all institutional levels. Collaboration can facilitate the Zen objective of integrating conflicting ideas, a key feature of innovation over the long run.

The Secret Sauce of Innovation

Could it be that today’s pervasive bad news, the news that causes everyone else to moan and complain—the economic malaise, the chaos that the digital revolution created, the impacts of outsourcing, political instability, global competition—can offer amazing opportunities to out- distance your competition? In this second chapter excerpt from the new book, Agile Innovation, Langdon Morris explores innovation-under-duress.

Global Platforms for Co-creating Hyper-Local Solutions

The products and services we use are developing in two seemingly opposite directions: We want customized and localized solution – but they should fit into a global network of services and brands. A business model to meet this paradox is to create global platforms that enable a large number of actors to create very local and personalized solutions.

The New Normal: From Product to Platforms and Processes

Platforms and processes, rather than products, will become the focus of new business creation as we move forward. The main characteristic of a handful of new trends in business – Collaborative consumption, Sharing, the Maker movement and the Circular economy – is that the value creation is less about adding some new feature to a product. Instead, the appeal of these models is that they can deliver more value for less by involving a number of stakeholders, including the users, in co-creating solutions.

Do SMEs Lose their Appetite for Innovation During the Economic Crisis?

Innovation is always a result of taking risk and mastering these risks successfully. However, in the past few years the risks resulting from the overall economic situation seems to have increased for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). As they cannot control these external risks many of them seem to stay away from too risky innovation projects. This has implications for the SMEs and for those who provide innovation support for SMEs?

R&D Spending Returns to Pre-Recession Levels, Finds Strategy& Global Innovation 1000 Study

Year after year, our Global Innovation 1000 study has demonstrated that it is not how much companies spend on research and development that determines success — what really matters is how those R&D funds are invested in talent, process, and tools. In addition to our recurring analysis of R&D spending trends, our eighth annual study of the world’s 1000 largest corporate R&D spenders focuses on the “fuzzy front-end” of the innovation process — the tools, mechanisms and networks companies use to generate ideas and effectively convert them into commercialization projects.

2021-12-05T08:41:44-08:00November 7th, 2012|Categories: Report|Tags: , , , , , , , |

Chinese Consumers to the Rescue

Between now and 2020, Chinese consumers will become the main driver of China’s economy, and probably also the global economy. The opportunities are enormous, worth billions of dollars as per capita incomes treble, and disposable income tops $10 billion per year. Meeting Chinese consumers’ needs is perhaps one of the greatest opportunities ever; it is also one of the greatest challenges, if we are not to deplete the planet disastrously; nor create debt fuelled bubbles, or high inflation.

2021-12-05T08:41:39-08:00October 31st, 2012|Categories: News, Trend Alert|Tags: , , , , |