Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

As innovation is a necessity for any organization today, the ability to assess and measure the progress and impact of your innovation efforts might be a true source of competitive advantage. This in-depth article offers fresh experiences, best practice and insights from how a number of multinational companies within the MedTech, telecom and manufacturing industries are working with establishing and implementing innovation measurement programs.

Are you effectively using the creative potential of your employees, customers and partners to address your innovation challenges? Collaborative idea management is a method to learn from the “wisdom of the crowd” in order to drive innovation. This in-depth article gives you an introduction including best practice from how Ericsson, the global telecom company worked with introducing and designing a successful collaborative idea management system.

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, but how sure can we be that this is something we can predict effectively? In this article Tony Ulwick argues that the traditional voice of the customer methodology is the wrong tool to determine customer needs. Tony presents an alternative methodology that makes it possible to determine all the needs of a given customer group.

Innovation management has become one of the most critical factors contributing to sustained business growth. Co-creation is an extremely powerful driver of innovation provided that you manage the process and harness social technology. In this article Catherine Constantinides takes a closer look at the different tools you need to consider to be successful.

Crafting design strategies that result in truly compelling brand experiences, products and services demands a change from traditional methods. It requires a more creative and iterative design approach, which is optimized towards identifying real human needs and addressing them with meaningful experiences. Paul Noble-Campbell delves deeper into five critical keys to uncovering those true success drivers.

Do we have too static and rigid a view of innovation? It should be all about dynamic connections, imagination, experience and the interconnection of people and machines. In short it should be about identifying, understanding and exploiting innovation ecosystems, says Eunika Mercier-Laurent, author of The Innovation Ecosystem.

Can you improve the innovation process as well as reducing the cost of engaging with users, developing new ideas and prototyping and testing solutions by making use of virtual environments? Jeffrey Philips and Jena Ball point the way.

The innovation ecosystem is not new but in 2011 it certainly has many new features. Jorn Bang Andersen looks back at the evolution of the innovation ecosystem, where it is now headed and how companies can develop ecosystem strategies.

Universities and higher level research institutes need a better way of getting innovations into the market and that means taking risks earlier in negotiations. IP management systems designed for early disclosure could be the answer, argues Maxine Horn.

Over the past three years companies have invested heavily in generating new ideas. So how do you make new ideas happen? Scott Belsky shares some of the secretes of successful rainmakers.

Companies that invest in developing strong innovation teams in their core product areas can extend that skill to other parts of the organization – Doug Collins looks at the skills your innovators are now developing and how they can be repurposed and extended.

Companies who are engaged in developing innovation processes are also likely to be involved in outsourcing significant aspects of their operations. So how do you innovate when you’ve also outsourced? Sanjiv Gossain explores the issues.

Stage gate management at the front end of innovation is an accepted practice in innovation management but is it the right approach as we move away from traditional dependence on R&D for product innovation? Paul R Williams, Executive Director of American Institute for Innovation Excellence suggests an alternative.

Eric Von Hippel has long been an advocate of user-led innovation but it is not always clear what user-led innovation really means. A newly released study on consumer innovation by Von Hippel reveals more than you might think. Haydn Shaughnessy delves deeper..

The importance of new markets to growth can’t be overstated. But emerged, emerging and frontier markets are not just about growth. They are a perfect opportunity to extend our innovation capabilities. IM takes a look at the lessons of India as a product frontier.