How World Class Companies Manage Their Innovation Portfolio
Managers often make the mistake of believing they can choose a winning idea on day one. That's not how innovation works. The best way to find a good idea is to invest in loads of ideas, then see which ideas are showing traction over time. The more ideas you have, the better chance you have of finding something of value to create a new…
The Mindsets Needed for High-Performing Innovation Teams
Large organizations are usually really good at incremental innovation. That's what they're wired to do. But when it comes to true disruption, most corporations struggle to drive permanent, repeatable, and scalable growth. As innovation absorbs money and resources and needs investment and protection, corporates must shift from thinking about growth…
The Problem With Lean Startup... And Solution To Its Fatal Flaw
A business is a system- and when it comes to systems, optimizing only parts will pessimize the whole. That's the reason why applying principles of – “start small, solve for Product-Market Fit, and build iteratively in the market" – to new, unimagined market spaces often creates ventures with no path to profitability. In this article, we’ll dive…
How to Use the Principles of Innovation to Tackle the Sustainability Challenge
Recent times have been a catalyst for personal and social re-prioritization, urging reflection on important topics and accelerating social, economic, and technology trends. This is reflected in anything from expanding the reach of digital tools and online shopping, to the rising importance of mental wellbeing and supporting local businesses. More…
The Key Conditions To Get Results From Working With Startups
Corporates and startups face big challenges in working together, given their different sizes and cultures. However, corporate-startup relationships offer untapped potential. So better to find ways to stay ahead of challenges before they threaten possible outcomes. During our recent Innov8rs Connect on Startup Collaboration & Ecosystem…
Innovation For Sustainability: How Lufthansa, bp and Enel Are Organized For Leading The Way in Their Industries
Climate change projections are getting more alarming more urgent. As such, consumers and employees demand brands to take action, and governments are implementing aggressive environmental and climate regulations. It’s clear we can’t continue with business as usual: we need new solutions at scale- fast. As innovators, we know that’s easier said than…
Corporate Venture Building: The Practice
Previously, we explored why corporate venture building seems to offer a better path to innovation and growth. We outlined the key elements of the end-to-end corporate venture building process in this article: from alignment with the mothership and leadership buy-in, to governance and funding models and the team setup. In the follow up article…
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…
