The What & Why of Continuous Discovery
The best teams recognize that digital products are never finished; they constantly improve. There's always a need to have continuous product discovery in the digital world, and as such, it's important to create a regular cadence of interaction between the product team and the customers they’re building for. At our recent Innov8rs Connect on…
Mitigating Not-invented-here and Not-sold-here Problems: The Role of Corporate Innovation Hubs
Innovation hubs often are set up to engage in external ecosystems and bring in new ideas from the outside. While the number of these "outposts" has grown significantly over the last years, most find that successful collaboration with and knowledge transfer to the mothership is far from easy. Often, negative attitudes about receiving external…
Entrepreneurial Employees: Intrapreneurship at Nestlé, Swisscom, Bayer, IKEA, Siemens and SAP
In every organization, thousands of new business ideas are waiting to be unlocked. If well supported, these could lead to major improvements of existing products or services and business models, or to launching new ones altogether. Yet most employees get those ideas whilst doing their jobs, and may think it's not their responsibility to act. They…
Building an Open Innovation Ecosystem: The Evolution of Build/Buy/Partner/Invest Models
How can large companies reach outside their four walls to exploit the insights, expertise and investments of the broader open innovation ecosystem? During our recent Innov8rs Connect on Startup Collaboration & Ecosystem Engagement, Pilot44's Andrew Backs shared how corporate innovation programs can spot emerging trends & threats, exploit…
The Politics of Innovation
We know most innovations fail- but more often than not, that has nothing to do with consumer needs and market feedback. Even before being tested in anything resembling a commercial context, ideas stumble because of organizational politics. Indeed: innovation often fails to happen because of obstructions from stakeholders inside the company, rather…
Four Design Principles for End-to-End Innovation
The management and ownership of innovation and portfolio management as two separate functions is not fit for purpose in a world where change is a precondition for business success. In today’s dynamic business environment, sticking with a rigid project control system is not the way to help organizations embrace and deliver change. The demands set…
Corporate Venture Building: The Process
With 70% of M&A failing, and only two years after a big corporate acquires a startup, 50% of the top talent is gone, corporate venture building seems to offer a better path to innovation and growth. Corporate venture building makes the most of your core organization’s existing assets to create separate but linked businesses offering new…
The Evolution of the Corporate Innovation Function (And What That Means For Your Career)
These days, it’s hard to find a CEO who wouldn’t publicly claim how important innovation is. The trick is that in those statements, “innovation” is used as a label for both lofty future ambitions to disrupt industries, to digitizing current operations, and everything in between. And then internally, “innovation” is all too often associated with…
8 Power Skills to Boost Your Impact as Corporate Innovator
If you're like most corporate innovators, you're always looking for ways to be more impactful in your organization. A career in innovations requires a unique mix of several skills. Yet most companies' professional development programs are rarely tailored to your needs. As part of our recent Innov8rs Connect on Careers & Personal Development,…
Get To Next: From Innovation To Activation
Ideas matter. But unless we activate them, they will never reach their full potential. Activating innovative ideas – or making sure they actually “get to next” – means moving them across the finish line, making them happen. However, it’s much easier to have and pick innovative ideas than activate them. Only 6% of executives are satisfied with…
How to Build CFO Support for Your New Venture
Having CFO support is crucial for the success of your new venture. But how to overcome the resistance of a finance team, known to be more process-oriented than learning-oriented? In order to figure this out and define some actionable tactics you could use, we hosted a discussion with Mike Joslin, Director at High Alpha Innovation, as part of…
5 Pitfalls In Strategic Partnering & Open Innovation To Avoid
Open innovation and building strategic partnerships fuel disruption from the outside-in, rather than just focusing on the inside-out- but it's far from easy. To understand how to get results from strategic partnering and open innovation, we recently hosted a conversation with Kevin Ye, Partner at Mach49, who works with global businesses to help…
