The Best CEOs Are Chief Ecosystem Officers – How to Approach Ecosystem Strategy
Ecosystems can be immense value drivers, but also quickly turn into competitive threats. Their interconnected nature is putting up new challenges for companies. What then should businesses do about ecosystems? At our recent Innov8rs Connect on Startup Collaboration and Ecosystem Engagement, Martin Spindler Principal at hy - the Axel Springer…
Gorillas Can Dance: Cultivating Effective Startup Partnerships to Foster Corporate Innovation
Faced with disruption, large corporations are realizing the value of partnering with start-ups. However, while this could result in win-win collaborations, developing productive partnerships is not straightforward. The very thing that attracts them to each other – their significant differences – also makes it difficult to work together. Therefore,…
How Lots of Small Bets Are Key To Realizing Your Corporate Innovation Strategy
It’s hard to venture into the unknown while navigating the risks along the way. All corporate innovation strategies involve an element of risk. The important thing is that you effectively manage your risk, and you can do that by making lots of small bets. At a recent Innov8rs Connect online event, Tom Salmon and Andrew Humphries, co-founders of…
Why Corporate-Startup Collaboration is Trending and How to Make it Work
Innovating with startups and scaleups is just one of the many facets of open innovation. Still, corporate-startup collaboration remains of its most “alluring” modes. The reason is twofold. First, the attributes, know-how and networks of startups can be highly sought after. Second, this type of collaboration promises to be a universal panacea,…
Commitment To Innovation Leads To 2.4x More Profit
Have you ever had to prove or justify your spending on innovation? Research by McKinsey shows that a high commitment to innovation is correlated to 2.4x better financial performance. In this piece we will explore how you can take the first steps towards achieving it. In times of financial hardship, companies react differently. While some press…
The 9 Secrets to Bringing Ideas to Life
Over the last 7 years, Will Read and the team at Sideways 6 have learned a lot about what it takes to implement ideas and innovation at big companies. And it’s not easy. In fact, it can be pretty darn hard. Will joined us for Innov8rs Connect Unconference 2021 to share the nine secrets that enable some of the biggest companies in the world to not…
How to Design a Growth Incubator
We all know the average lifespan of a business has dramatically dropped in recent years, but still, large organizations have such a difficult time successfully creating new business lines and renewing themselves as a result. In his session at a recent Innov8rs Connect event, Mach49’s Edward Ross gave us two clear examples. Marriott should have…
The New Leadership Toolbox to Drive Innovation
When you're trying to drive innovation, one of the key shifts to make as a leader is that you have to give up on the need to get it right the first time. Tendayi Viki, Associate Partner at Strategyzer and author of Pirates in the Navy, The Corporate Startup, and The Lean Product Lifecycle, joined a recent Innov8rs Connect event to discuss the…
Lean Scaleup: Building New Businesses From Innovation
Companies are not good at building new businesses from innovation. Only 1 out of 10 attempts make it to scale and become a sizeable business. According to Frank Mattes, co-author of Lean Scaleup, there are two fundamental issues causing this. The first issue is that under one roof, you have two systems that are designed for two totally different…
Learnings From Building 24 Corporate Ventures
Corporate venture building is one of the most hyped subjects in the innovation world at the moment. McKinsey data suggests that corporations that prioritize business building grow faster, respond with more resilience, and succeed in parallel ventures more often. But there's a problem. Most business building ventures fail. Bernd Schmidt &…
Upgrading Your Executives On Innovation
While innovation is essential for the growth and survival of a business, many leaders don't feel equipped with the resources or expertise required to innovate—or, even worse, they don't recognize the importance of innovation for their company. At a recent Innov8rs Connect event, Stefan Lindegaard broke down the challenges facing organizations when…
The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization
The continuous technology-driven unbundling of markets and the rising complexity and unpredictability of our socio-economic systems are pushing us to redesign a theory of organizing that works for the 21st century. Such a theory, as Simone Cicero shared recently on our virtual stage, is based on transforming organizations into networks of loosely…
