Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

InnovationManagement is delighted to present a brand new Case Study highlighting the challenges of creating an innovation culture that: supports new product/service development initiatives, facilitates the creation of idea campaigns, spurs employee engagement and develops business value. In this article, Colin Nelson, Director of Strategic Consulting at HYPE Innovation, delves deeper into how collaborative innovation challenges were identified, managed and successfully overcome at Swisslog.

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.

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.

Reaching the highest point of the Earth is one of the greatest expeditions of mankind. It made Edmund Hillary famous. After reading Hillary’s ‘View from the Summit’ Gijs van Wulfen shares ten innovation lessons on being 1st.

The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen. It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity. Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity. In this article Paul Sloane takes a look at what lessons to be learned from the failure.

It is often in the commencement of one’s career that simple mistakes are made. Whether it’s a result of inexperience, blinding enthusiasm or fearlessness doesn’t really matter, as long as the lesson learned serves you, and others, well. Gijs van Wulfen shares a constructive experience from his first innovation position.

Earlier this month I attended the eleventh annual International Congress on Open Innovation and Co-Development, organized by Management Roundtable and the PDMA. The conference covered many hot Open Innovation topics, including the models, tools and best practices needed to successfully leverage open innovation and co-development techniques.

The Chinese are innovating in a uniquely Chinese manner and consequently rising as formidable challengers to traditional multinational companies. Professor Winter Nie has found four interesting features regarding the manner in which the Chinese innovate: innovation on-site, innovation to reduce costs, tailored innovation and rapid product innovation.

The tale of Nokia being squeezed from the top by Apple and Google and from the bottom by companies from Taiwan and India holds just as important lessons for European innovation polices as it does for Nokia.