Embrace Failure to Build a Stronger Innovation Culture

by Stefan Lindegaard

The fast pace of change, business and thus innovation requires several changes in the innovation processes as well as in the innovation culture in today’s organizations.

One key element is that they must embrace and foster a culture of experimentation in which failure is acceptable as long as the intentions were relevant and if the learning of the failure was captured so that you don’t go on repeating the same failures over and over again.

This is the topic for the presentation I gave at TrendForum in Berlin earlier this year. The video is now ready and thus I have updated this blog post with it:

You can also download the presentation here.

Now, on with the blog post…

This is not the case today …

FREE Workshop or Consulting Session! (Only in the U.S.)

by Stefan Lindegaard

Would your company like to get some external perspectives on these topics?

• Be Competitively Unpredictable: Make It Happen Through Innovation

• Innovation Culture: The Big Elephant in the Room

• Making Open Innovation Work

• Social Media for Innovation Efforts

I can offer you a free workshop (3 hours) or consulting session on the above topics if we can make this happen on June 10-14 or July 11-19. This only applies in the U.S.  You do not have to pay a fee for this, but I will ask you to help cover my travel costs (about USD 2,000).

Let me know if you would like to discuss this.

Best regards,

Stefan

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6 Drivers for Intrapreneurs and Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

I am giving a workshop on intrapreneurship next week and as I am doing some research, I decided to update this post and ask for more input on the drivers for intrapreneurs – and innovation in general.

If you wonder what the term, intrapreneur, means the American Heritage Dictionary in 1992 acknowledged this as “a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation.

Entrepreneurs are driven by passion, an urge to execute on their ideas and the chance to strike gold. Intrapreneurs do not have quite the same personal reasons for what they do. Yet they still have to be in an environment where they can bring on innovation that makes …

Top 5 Companies for Open Innovation – May 2013

by Stefan Lindegaard

Here you get my current top 5 list of strong open innovation initiatives and efforts. Your comments and suggestions for other companies are appreciated!

1. Google Glass – for taking an open approach for a disruptive offering

I take it as a clear sign of the changing game of innovation that Google early on recognized that they needed to be open on their efforts with the Glass. Now, they are building an ecosystem that can help develop the apps that will make people buy and use the Glass. Read more in this blog post: Google Glass versus Apple: Different Takes on Open Innovation

2. Microsoft and their Kinect Accelerator program – better late than never

As you will notice, a key element in my suggestions …

Business Opportunity: Innovation Workshops in Your Region

by Stefan Lindegaard

Do you want to host an innovation workshop in your city? Do you want to make some money on this? Well, then we should talk. I am currently putting the finishing touches on a range of innovation exercises that are important elements in some interesting half-day workshops on topics such as:

• Be Competitively Unpredictable: Make It Happen Through Innovation

• Innovation Culture: The Big Elephant in the Room

• Making Open Innovation Work

• Social Media for Innovation Efforts

I am looking for partners, who want to help organize and market the workshops. I will deliver the workshop using my content and help market the workshop through my social media platform. Your key role is to help identify and attract potential participants. I usually work with a fixed …

Universities, Tech Transfer Units and Corporate Innovation Teams in the Era of Open Innovation: A Survey

by Stefan Lindegaard

Are Universities, Tech Transfer Units Open Innovation Losers? I asked this question in a blog post a while back and this sparked an interesting discussion in which the answer leaned towards a big YES. You can read the blog post below and here. If you do so, then please also check out the comments. Very interesting!

Now, I would like to follow up with a survey in which I ask questions such as:

To which extent are universities and tech transfer units prepared to work with corporate innovation teams in the era of open innovation?

Open innovation offers more external opportunities to corporate innovation teams. To which extent will this be a positive thing for universities and tech transfer units?

To which extent do …

Social Media and Innovation: Get Your Own Skin into the Game!

by Stefan Lindegaard

I recently had a talk with a guy who claimed that he knew exactly what social media can do for companies. The funny thing is that he knew this without even using social media himself as he did not believe in this as a way to get his work done. His claim was based on lots of observations related to investment opportunities.

I was a bit surprised by his position and claims. Even though, I spend several hours a day using social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter, I do not have a clear-cut answer on how to extract value out of social media. I have gained some good insights, but I still consider myself to be in an experimentation phase and I have …

Are B2B Companies Slower Adaptors of Open Innovation?

by Stefan Lindegaard

As I am about to do an open innovation session for a B2B company, I got to think about this question once again and since it works well for a good discussion, let me start out with a couple of remarks:

• B2B companies are actually just as good as consumer goods companies on open innovation, but the latter are just more visible when it comes to open innovation initiatives. A reason for this could be that the products and brands of consumer goods companies are better known and thus we hear more about these companies.

• B2B companies have longer development cycles and thus it takes longer for them to adapt to open innovation.

• B2B companies have more engineers working on innovation relative …

You Don’t Have to Own Everything to Make Innovation Happen

by Stefan Lindegaard

In my last blog post: Yes, Innovation Is Messy!, I urged companies to look into a faster approach to innovation in which you do not always know the outcomes of your actions.

This spurred an interesting comment from Michael Fruhling, which went like this:

“It is a lot easier to take the Starbucks approach when you control the distribution channel, and therefore, they get to assume all of the risk. I assume that Microsoft can (or could) pull this off because they are (were) the only game in town for PC based operating systems. Other folks don’t typically have this kind of leverage.”

True. It is easier to be bolder in your innovation approaches when you own the distribution channel as you can …

Yes, Innovation Is Messy!

by Stefan Lindegaard

Today, innovation happens fast and the outcome is not always fully prepared for the customers. We see this fairly often within the IT industry (think Microsoft which earned the reputation for “saving” the final debugging for the customers) and this is also the case with mobile payments at Starbucks as you can read about in this article: Starbuck’s Execs Respond to Square Criticism: Innovation Is Messy

In the article, I like this qoute by one of the Starbuck’s executives: “We don’t want to wait on innovation,” Brotman explained. “Because if we waited until we could make it perfect across every single experience of every single store, we would have to move much more slowly for the vast majority of our customers. So we’ve taken an …