Innovation Teams: How To Establish Yourself As A Key Function In Your Company

Innovation teams provide an important function to every company’s progress and evolution. But they are much easier to disband than core functions like legal, finance, or HR. In fact, innovation teams might be viewed as expendable as external consultations. So innovation teams find themselves fighting for the right to survive. Here are some of the…

Read More

The Missing Middle: How to Spread Innovation to the Rest of the Organization

When innovative ideas repeatedly hit a dead-end within an organization, leaders often ask themselves, “how do we get more people engaged in innovation?” But maybe that’s the wrong question. In this interactive session, NOBL Collective's Chief Research Officer Paula Cizek discussed how to bridge the critical gap between invention and industry…

Read More

Innovation Now: Be Prepared To Accelerate Out of the Turn

Coming out of the Covid19 pandemic, everyone is wondering what the new normal will look like. With disruption comes opportunity. It gives innovators the chance to rethink organizational goals, models, and tools to accelerate innovation. During our recent Innov8rs Connect Unconference, Sopheon's Chief Technology Officer Paul Heller shared how to…

Read More

How To Choose And Lead The Right Innovation Strategy

Innovation works even in the worst of times. According to a recent McKinsey report, those who take on this challenge during adversity outperform other companies by 10% during the crisis and 30% post-crisis. Realizing those returns requires a sound innovation strategy, and the capabilities required to deliver it. In their Innov8rs Connect…

Read More

How To Get Leadership On The Side Of Innovation

In a recent Ask Me Anything session with Rita McGrath, one of the key themes that emerged during the conversation was the need to get leadership support for innovation. Rita suggests you approach your leadership through the lens of your portfolio activities. When discussing innovation with your CEO or CFO, you will have to address two levels of…

Read More

Lead From the Future: How to Use Future-back Thinking to Lead and Innovate in Times of Crisis

As the Covid-19 pandemic shakes the global economy and disrupts the way we live, work, and conduct business, leaders are scrambling to manage the immediate fallout. But, visionary leaders like Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela didn’t simply react to the most imminent threats confronting them; they were guided by their vision for a better…

Read More

How to Become an Invincible Company

When we say “invincible” we understand that no company is actually invincible. All companies are at risk of failure in one way or another; however, there are things that your company can do to stay ahead. Alexander Osterwalder hosted a Ask Me Anything session during our recent Innov8rs Connect Unconference. He shared that in his experience, there…

Read More

What Corporate Innovators Need to Do to Ensure Post-Crisis Growth

Corporate innovation has always been a tough job. It is now even tougher by budget cuts and working from home. At the same time, corporate innovators are asked to do new things from a smaller base: they are supposed to help navigate uncharted territories (the “New Normal”) and to set up the company for post-crisis growth. It is easy to view these…

Read More

To Innovate for “Real”, You Must Disrupt The Core

We are facing massive uncertainty, especially at times like these. We, as innovators, can and should lead our organizations forward. To do so, Brant Cooper, CEO at Moves The Needle, believes we need to leverage the five “E’s” of disruption poetry: Empathy, Experiments, Evidence, Execution and Ethics. The trick here is that we need to stop…

Read More

The Darker Side of Innovation: Innovation Fatigue, Innovation Stress, and the Innovation Crisis To Come

Innovation isn’t all fun and games, and professor Alf Rehn has dedicated himself to exploring the darker, more difficult sides of it. He has introduced notions such as “innovation fatigue”, written extensively on innovation stress, and discussed today’s and tomorrow’s innovation crises. In the Ask Me Anything we hosted with Alf as part of the…

Read More

From Corporate Startup to Scaleup: Incubation at BASF, BP, Wärtsilä and EnBW

Many large organizations have established different types of incubation and acceleration programs. These agile, design-thinking-driven idea chambers help you experiment with radical ideas outside the lens of your core business model. You get a chance to test out new tools, play around with those crazy business models, and experiment with the…

Read More

Key Takeaways From Innov8rs Connect Unconference Week 8

"I lost count of questions answered, insights shared and frameworks taught..." We've made it to the end. In 100+ sessions, with 550+ innovators from 50+ countries, we've explored a wide variety of topics relevant at this moment, and addressed the many challenges -old and new- we're facing leading innovation in large organizations. Here's a glimpse…

Read More