Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

The Nordic countries have a high number of start-up companies but are struggling with scaling their entrepreneurs, start-ups and innovations to global large-scale operations and companies. Yet, one Nordic company namely Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems managed to become world-beater within the global wind turbine industry. But but after 2008 Vestas has experienced a near death experience and is struggling for survival. Vestas’ story holds important lessons for other Nordic companies, not only within the renewable energy industry. It will here be argued that had Vestas paid more attention to what the management guru Peter Drucker labeled the five deadly business sins Vestas might have avoided getting into dire straits.

SMEs are perceived as the back-bone of most economies in Europe. Therefore, a lot of programs have been launched to support their growth. Over the past years, offering innovation support has become popular, complementing the well-known start-up financing and technology transfer programs. Despite the above, there is a level of dissatisfaction regarding the impact of these services.

While the previous two methods – Netnography and Social Media Solution Scouting – outline the potential of passive methods in using the power of social media for innovation, the next two approaches enable companies to interact with consumers. Configuration Tools as well as Innovation Contests invite users outside the company’s four walls to become an active part of new product development. In part two of this article you will learn how Audi and Henkel empowered the crowd and turned them into co-producers.

Open innovation has found its way into companies’ innovation processes and is a widely used approach to spur collaborative innovation with consumers. A multitude of methods and tools have come into being, creating confusion about how to make the most out of users’ knowledge and creativity. This article provides innovation managers with insights into four popular open innovation practices at four German blue chips and contrasts the various approaches.

There has been a continued debate around finding and adopting a set of standards for innovation. I blow a little hot and cold on this – not dependent on the time of day but the very “force” that is pushing the agenda along. Far, far too many who push for standards often have very narrow agendas, where this fits their commercial purpose and you get the feeling that they are not as aligned to the broader innovation communities as they should be.

As the need for systematic innovation deepens, establishing common innovation management standards becomes a precondition for sustained value creation in all organizations – longstanding or new, large or small, public or private.

Switzerland is more innovative and entrepreneurial than generally thought. The world holds on to the caricature of Heidi and of utterly dull bankers, evoked by Helmut Schmidt, many years ago: “Europe is not governed by the gnomes of Zurich”. We forget the implications of the fact that the Swiss national hero is the ultimate rebel: Wilhelm Tell; and rebellion is companion of innovation.The strong Swiss franc and the weak state of the economies of its trading partners will make 2012 difficult, but Switzerland scores tangible successes: prosperity, low debt, reasonable growth, public budgets in the black, low unemployement and trade surplus. This miniature model of Europe must be an inspiration for the EU to become what it should be: the world’s most successful region in the 21rst century.

Open innovation crowd sourcing methods, when applied to the right problem, can effectively extend the solution provider search beyond the boundaries of an industry. This article presents the application of a targeted broadcast crowd sourcing method to identify unobvious solution providers for a German chain-drive industry consortium. The majority of solutions submitted through this method were previously unknown to the consortium. This evaluation demonstrates the power of open crowd sourcing to provide solutions from discontinuous industries and how effective crowd sourcing can be in open innovation.

Every innovation project starts from an idea or a problem and mostly, all innovation teams do jump immediately to the feasibility study and scenario analysis dedicating little or no time to the assessment of the risks of innovation projects. This series of article represents an extended dashboard of internal, external and hidden risks of such projects in aiding innovation teams throughout their risk management activities. The first article looks deeper into what drives a successful innovation eco-system.

For the second year running, Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore lead in overall innovation performance according to the Global Innovation Index 2012 (GII): Stronger Innovation Linkages for Global Growth, published by INSEAD, the leading international business school, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations.

Germany is a forward-thinking nation with the largest GDP in Europe. Germany is also one out of only four innovation leaders in the top performance group of all EU27 Member States. Their private and public sector R&D funding is on the rise in the midst of a global economic crisis and they enjoy growing economic ties with China. So what is Germany doing right?

The mission of this project is to support the EU Commission and the EU in general to help small & medium businesses, innovative entrepreneurs and the public sector to understand, adopt and leverage Social Media with the intention to more successfully grow their respective businesses, create additional jobs and better integrate government and population.

Europe boasts a world-leading chemical and biotechnology sector which will make a substantial impact on future growth and job creation. The European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry (SusChem), a forum that unites industry and academia, announced plans to evolve into a Europe-wide network that captures the full benefit of Europe’s strengths in research and a well-connected network for innovation in the chemical and biotechnology value chain.

This year’s Innovation Union Scoreboard shows that most Member States have improved their innovation performance. This allows the European Union to maintain a clear lead over the emerging economies of China, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa, but not to close the existing gap with innovation leaders such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. More efforts are therefore needed so as to address the EU’s weaknesses. One area in the spotlight is related to firms’ innovation activities.

Clientelism, Wintelism and innovation eco-systems: moments of truth within the global semiconductor industry. Europe and Japan tried for years to challenge Intel by building national seminconductor champions, yet wihout success. Today, a small British company named ARM has qua its eco-system strategy managed to launch a more serious go at Intel.