Increasing Innovation Impact in the Enterprise

You would be hard-pressed to find a business leader who would question the importance of innovation not only to promote growth within their organization, but also to ensure its very survival. These business leaders have invested significantly in their innovation initiatives to support this importance. Yet a 2012 Accenture study found that more than half of corporate executives were disappointed by their innovation results and returns from their innovation investments.

How to Develop your Innovation Management Consulting Business in Tough Times

Companies become increasingly restrictive in their consulting spending, especially during times of economic crisis, where the return on the investments on consulting services is questioned and carefully considered. Consulting in the area of innovation management is even more under pressure as it is usually much lower on the CEOs’ agenda than e.g. restructuring or general cost-cutting. Therefore, innovation management consultants face the challenge to develop their client base, be effective by providing the right recommendations and be efficient by developing these recommendations in as short a period of time as possible. Mastering such a challenge seems like searching for Columbus’ Egg in innovation management consulting.

Get a Taxi – Anatomy of a Process Innovation

With over 400 million Google hits, “innovation” may be considered a buzzword, some entrepreneurs may even avoid talking about it, but they’re certainly practicing it! This article takes a closer look at an example of process innovation in the service industry. Understanding it better offers the possibility of spotting a large range of opportunities and converting them into business successes.

10 Tips for Successful Innovation Teams

Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. This article provides a collection of ten tips that serve as a talent management roadmap for growth companies in search of high-performance teams that deliver.

The Purposeful Entrepreneur

What makes an entrepreneur's decision making different from an executive's and can the two ever meet? We asked investor and start-up champion Tony Fish to explore entrepreneur vs. executive innovator as he prepares to launch a novel new digital collaborative incubator in London.

Managing Innovation Through the Stress Points

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.

Technology Entrepreneurship for Emerging Markets – An Ecosystem Approach

Technology Entrepreneurship (TE) offers unique development opportunities for societies to educate and grow local talent, build diversity and long term economic health. GATE –Global Accelerators of Technology Entrepreneurship – is an initiative to support TE in emerging economies by leveraging the entrepreneurial ecosystems and international networks centered at US research universities.

The New Dutch Economy: Innovative, International and Involving

The Dutch Innovation Platform, a think-tank established by the Dutch Government, recently released a report Nederland 2020, Back in the top 5 outlining the steps the Netherlands needs to take to regain its former position in the top 5 of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index (GCI). In this article Rob Blaaboer, contributing editor from the Netherlands, suggests a way to reach the New Dutch economy, i.e. innovative, international and involving, and how to get back in the top 5.

How to commercialize your ideas – part 1

There are plenty of innovation and ideation efforts that yield new ideas for growth but never generate a dime for their inventors or the companies that develop them. Why? Because many inventors don't understand how to jump the gap from ideas to actually selling them.

To Re-invent Your Company, Reinvent Yourself

Companies are increasingly recognizing that today’s turbulent times require nothing short of continual reinvention. Weathering today’s storm isn’t enough. Companies need to develop repeatable processes that regularly renew their firms before the next crisis hits. This kind of renewal must begin with the leaders themselves.

How do you Build and Sustain a Culture and Climate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship?

The fifth major issue to be tackled by our distinguished panel of innovation practitioners is innovation culture, specifically: How do you build and sustain a culture and climate for innovation and entrepreneurship, and how do you encourage "smart risk taking" and drive out fear of failure?