Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

Product organizations often fill their pipelines with more ideas than their budget and resources can handle because they lack the means to identify and prioritize the winning ideas. The result is that most organizations have too many projects for their resources and miss opportunities to develop the products that will gain them market share. In this IM Channel One Ask the Expert Q&A hosted by Planview, the experts discussed how organizations should assess which products are market-worthy, and how to prioritize them to justify resource allocation is critical to the product organization’s success.

In its latest Global Innovation Excellence Study Arthur D. Little provides hard evidence on which innovation practices separate top innovators from others within and across a wide range of industries. The study zooms in on the relationship between innovation success – based on impact of innovation – and innovation performance – based on a comprehensive framework which breaks down innovation activity into different areas and looks at adoption of best practices in each – and is available as an online toolkit. The toolkit is readily accessible and provides valuable feedback on innovation performance as measured against peers, including opportunities for improvement.

To succeed in a fast-paced competitive global economy, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) are increasingly adopting Open Innovation (OI) management strategies. A lack of resources, however, frequently requires SMEs to implement OI strategies on their own without the assistance of a management strategy professional. This article offers clear, do-it-yourself steps to initiate an OI program successfully within an SME.

Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?

Mash-ups are an innovation power tool. Most breakthrough innovations are the result of combining concepts or ideas that at first glance would have no relationship with each other. Finding the relationship between concepts often breaks new ground. This article delves deeper into the concept of mashups and how you can work with it to achieve innovation success.

The front and back ends of innovation test us in different ways. At the front end we wrestle with, “What problem is worth solving?” At the back end we wrestle with, “How do deliver something that offers greater relative advantage than the next best alternative?” The back end can test us the most. We tap fully our potential for leadership to produce something new—something that, in its newness, disrupts the status quo. In this article, innovation architect Doug Collins explores the link between the Skunk Works®, a successful approach to the back end developed during World War II, in the context of today’s approach to collaborative innovation.

Our first article in this series, titled “Include Business Model Review as a New Year Resolution”, described a method to reveal weaknesses in your business model. So, what do you do next after you complete your business model assessment and find weaknesses in one or more of its cornerstones? You find Value Accelerators (VA)™! VA’s are specific and market-proven ideas, assets or strategies that directly accelerate revenue and profit growth. This article discusses how to develop, assess and prioritize the best VAs to strengthen weaknesses in your business model. It also gives you a link to download an example of a scorecard to help prioritize the VAs.

Companies sometimes behave like the ostrich with their head in the ground while others emerge from the crisis like a phoenix. Not knowing with which new products or services your company really earns money is a bit like the ostrich. However there are effective means to gain transparency on innovation spending without too much effort. These tools also allow a comparison with your competitors to understand what they are doing differently in their approach to successfully managing their innovation activities. Finally, they help companies which currently struggle with the economic situation to become more effective and efficient in their innovation management.

Traditional Strategy, the dominant model of doing business for nearly half a century, is fast becoming a thing of the past, pushed aside by the fast-moving forces of social business – which include innovation, collaboration and co-creation.

In this in-depth article we present how Open innovation meshes with crowd sourcing, drawing on ideation, market needs and opportunities, to fuel a balanced portfolio with actionable innovation challenges, or « the right things to do », and converges these with a need driven approach to source the ways of « doing things right ». We will illustrate this innovation continuity with a number of examples and a focus onto the food and drink industry.

There is discussion about how much effort should be put into developing an innovation strategy especially by small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Aren’t many successful innovative offerings just a result of trial, error and finally good luck? Insights in more than 1,500 SMEs from the IMP³rove database demonstrate that strategic focus helps secure profitable growth by innovation.

Your teams did their market research. They ran an array of consumer insight sessions. They found the customers’ real Need. They ran professional ideation and storyboard sessions. They created prototypes and performed market tests. They developed their go to market strategy. They executed their plan. Product sales fell dramatically short of expectations. Why? What did they overlook?

Forget the Profit & Loss Statement (P&L) and Cash Flows – for just 30 minutes. Assess the key drivers of your business model that make you stronger or weaker than your competitors at creating, delivering and capturing value. In this article, we will present a tool to simplify your task – it’s been refined for 15 years by senior managers with responsibility for brands and P&Ls in both startups and multinationals.

The ability to increase business value through innovation is a critical success driver for most organizations. The markets that we operate in provide both opportunity and risk from an innovation perspective as they are rapidly changing. This article takes a look at a useful framework; The Innovation Diamond™, that examines the complexity and addresses some of the challenges in product innovation.

An interview with Mathias Kirchmer, one of the authors of Value – Driven Business Process Management: The Value-Switch for Lasting Competitive Advantage, published by McGraw Hill. Mr. Kirchmer is the managing director for Business Process Management at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.