5 Ways to Create a Successful Innovation Program

You’ve heard it a thousand times: companies need to innovate in order to survive. The Googles and the Apples of the world are doing it- Google famously used to require employees to dedicate 20% of their time to innovation. But what exactly does it take to create a sustainable innovation program, especially if you are in an industry that is traditionally risk averse?

As the global workforce is inundated with young, tech-savvy professionals, corporations must embrace the reality that, whether they like it or not, the world has gone social. People are leveraging crowdsourcing for personal forms of communication and entertainment, and crowdsourcing has found a place in the enterprise too.

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A Compelling Value Proposition: The Missing Tool in Your Lean Startup Kit

Eric Reis first introduced the concept of Lean Startup in 2008. Today Lean Startup is deployed far beyond entrepreneurial circles and is taking root in large, complex organizations looking to improve their new product success rates – and in the process build lean cultures. This is very good news. Too often the processes corporations use in pursuit of innovation can actually erode their capability to innovate. Still, when applying the principles of “Build – Measure – Learn” to initiating Lean practices in corporations, there is room for improvement…and possibly even for a pivot.

CVP before MVP

Corporations do not operate with the freedom of a startup, and navigating the internal learning and approval cycles can be even more challenging than effectively engaging customers. Before an intrapreneur starts coding, fabricating, etc. to test his/her new concept as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the market, approvals and sponsorship from management is required. So rather than building an MVP, I recommend that these intrapreneurs start with a CVP (Compelling Value Proposition). Innovators need a way to not only get smart fast about what their target customers want, but also about what management wants and will support. An effective bridge for crossing the internal chasm between a potentially brilliant idea and the approval to build a minimum viable product is essential.

Getting smart fast

1. Start the process by sharing your initial thoughts with a few trusted colleagues.
2. Once you’ve considered the comments of these initial exchanges carefully, and you find the idea still has significant value, widen your circle of support by talking to experts and key stakeholders. Build a mock-up.

Here is not the end.. To view full article about A Compelling Value Proposition: The Missing Tool in Your Lean Startup Kit visit Innovation Management.

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How to Do Business Model Innovation for the Established Firm

This article provides a systematic framework for helping executives of large, established organizations identify opportunities for business model innovation and organize themselves to pursue these opportunities. While also applicable to start-ups, this article focuses primarily on how to define, challenge, and revamp the business model of an existing business or organization.

In nearly every industry tried and tested business models are coming under attack at an unprecedented rate:Pharmaceutical companies are searching for alternatives to the blockbuster model. Banks are looking for innovative ideas to make up for lost fees and revenues due to new regulations. A drop in advertising revenues and circulation pushes newspapers towards new sources of income. Traditional brick and mortar bookstores are losing out to online competitors that are not encumbered by pricey real estate. Software providers are being threatened by cloud computing. The common root cause at the heart of the problem:a once successful business models.

“Changing a business model of an established organization is difficult – the gravitational pull of the existing business is hard to overcome.”

What is a business model, anyway?

A business model describes the logic behind how an organization communicates, creates, and captures value. Henry Chesbrough in his book “Open Innovation” suggests that a business model has six functions:

• Articulate the value proposition – the value created for users by the offering based on the technology.
• Identify a market segment – the users to whom the technology is useful and the purpose for which it will be used.

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How To Become A Business Model Architect

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.

People, like companies, have problems they cannot solve alone. Frequently, the sufferer feels the pain and recognizes the onset of symptoms, but cannot find practical solutions. The sad part is that there are likely to be proven solutions for their specific condition – the sufferer just does not know how to find them. This describes the struggle a company faces with business model weaknesses. Diagnosing such problems is difficult (symptoms are frequently misread) and a reliable cure is hard to find.

A quick history of our experience with Accelerators (VA)™

From 1989 to 1995, I worked with a team involved in researching how companies in different industries use variations of the same process innovations in new product development, customer acquisition, production, distribution, and other major processes.  In other words, we were hunters – looking for solutions proven by others to improve our own processes

These gems were easy to find – the popular business press covered them, and we visited top companies to speak with executives who were happy to discuss the smart things they had done. Our team developed a series of analytical “lenses” to clarify the value and portability of these gems that helped us curate them. We started building a catalog of valuable, highly adaptable, portable innovations.

Here is not the end….To view the full Article about How To Become A Business Model Architect visit Innovation Management. Also visit our various programs of Online Learning Innovation Programs and also get updated with our latest Articles.

Getting Innovation to Scale – Emergence (part 1 of 3)

    Through scaling, smart movers can quickly build substantial market shares – or define entirely new markets. To help understand scaling we have divided it into three main areas: Emergence, Networks and Waves. This article is on Emergence, the first in a series of three.

We operate in business and societal environments that are complex, dynamic, and uncertain. This environment provides new challenges and at the same time great opportunities through scaling – which we have defined as the successful introduction of innovations that spread rapidly in non-linear fashion, seemingly self-propelled and with relatively little effort, resulting in an outsized impact.

Our research draws on scientific approaches such as Complexity Theory, Behavioral Economicsand Systems Theory.  We have divided the topic into three main areas: Emergence, Networks, and Waves. Within these three areas, we have identified different tactics for leaders to benefit from scaling. We call these scaling frames.

• Emergence. As collective behavior, this frame refers to the phenomenon of patterns becoming apparent in complex systems of interacting agents. Innovation leadership can look to make use of emergent collective behavior by designing openness into a system and designing rules for interaction, which allow successful behavior to surface and spread. We have distinguished 13 separate tactics -or scaling frames- that we have clustered under Emergence.
• Networks. Innovation leadership can take advantage of the properties of networks, the structures and technology supporting networks, and the social conditioning that exists with network members to scale their innovations. We have identified six distinct network frames.

Here is not the end….To view the full Article about Getting Innovation to Scale – Emergence (part 1 of 3) visit Innovation Management. Also visit our various programs of Online Learning Innovation Programs and also get updated with our latest Articles.

An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself

Innovation portals have taken an important place in the open innovation landscape. Expectations are great in portal performance but often, for purely budgetary reasons, these portals are launched and managed internally by corporates themselves, to discover that they generate a number of community management issues that they are not used to coping with. Prior to launching a corporate portal it is a good idea to ask a few specific questions on whether to do this internally or through experienced third party innovation providers.

Open innovation is entering into a new phase. The way corporates are viewing open innovation has shifted radically and today there is a tendency for companies to ask themselves “why should I hire a third party service provider to do open innovation when I can do this myself?”

“Anyone can build furniture as long as they buy it from Ikea but that does not make them a cabinet-maker.”

The apparent simplicity of setting up an innovation portal is perhaps at the heart of the do-it-yourself portal mythology as it is so easy to download WordPress, code a few pages and then “build it and they will come”

Here is not the end…. To view the full blog about An Innovation Portal…I Can Do That Myself visit Innovation Management.

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Diversity and Innovation – A Perfect Team

 

Please, not another business imperative! Every time I open a journal or glance at a blog it seems as though the panacea to all business ills has just been discovered and is waiting for me to embrace it! One minute I’m being told to hire for cultural fit, the next to increase diversity. It’s no wonder that employee engagement is falling because if I’m being pushed from pillar to post then it’s not surprising that my people are confused……

Which of us can honestly say hand on heart that thoughts such as these haven’t slunk through our heads in the wee small hours of the night; when we should be resting but our minds are busy with the imperative to do more, be more, and to drive our organisations through to success. And the problem with dark thoughts in the middle of the night is that they come singly, they present themselves as completely individual challenges which have to be conquered one by one.

1. Collaborating for greatness

“Don’t just take the market, shape the market or create entirely new markets”.

So hiring for cultural fit and promoting diversity together can strengthen business prospects. Let’s think for a moment about one of the key elements of a culture of innovation, namely collaboration.

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