What Are Your Questions on Innovation?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I am working on a new feature on 15inno.com. It will be a mix of LinkedIn groups and Quora, the hot Q&A website.

The idea is quite simple. We are all participants in an international innovation community that has so much knowledge on almost any kind of innovation issue. Why not use this community to help each other?

I will offer everyone the opportunity to ask questions on 15inno.com and have them answered by this innovation community. I will act as a moderator and facilitator in the sense that I will remove questions that are not relevant to innovation and I will help spread the word about the questions you ask through my social media channels.

There will be a simple beta solution...

Innovation Personality Poker: A Great Book by Shapiro

by Stefan Lindegaard

My good friend, Steve Shapiro has written an interesting book, Personality Poker that gets great reviews on Amazon.com.

Besides being a potential last-minute Christmas present, you should also look into how you can use Steve’s insight at work.

Why? I think the below pitch by Steve gives the answer…

Innovation Personality Poker

Do you love facts and principles?

Do you crave new ideas and experiences?

Do you delight in planning and taking action?

Are you a people person who takes relationships seriously?

In other words, are you spade, diamond, club, or heart?

Find out by taking one of the quickest, easiest, and entertaining personality tests ever to hit the business market. Over 25,000 individuals in dozens of Fortune 500 companies...

10 Open Innovation Questions for SME’s

by Stefan Lindegaard

As a follow-up to my slightly provocative blog post, Why Open Innovation is Not for Small Companies, I have begun looking further into the interesting topic on how small companies can innovate with others.

I plan to interview several small companies and I am working on a set of questions for this. You can see the first 10 questions below. What do you think of them? Can you add others that can help highlight the real issues on this topic?

Why should small companies embrace open innovation?

What does open innovation mean to small companies? How does this differ from how big companies view open innovation?

What are the benefits of innovating together with others for small companies?

What concerns should small companies...

Great Report on Small Business Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

Intuit has recently made great improvements on their Intuit Collaboratory website. In a press-release announcing this, I found a link to the Intuit 2020 research series authored by Emergent Research together with Intuit.

On this site, you can find a great report on small business innovation. It starts with a good explanation of why small businesses are natural innovators and then looks into the drivers, enablers and amplifiers of small business innovation before we get some insights on innovation outcomes.

As we move towards open innovation, insights on how small businesses innovate is a key requirement for larger companies trying to become the preferred partner of choice within their given ecosystems. This report by Intuit is just another strong...

Control: Can Executives Lose Something They Never Had?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I recently gave a keynote-talk and facilitated a session for COTEC in Portugal. During the keynote-talk, I got an interesting question that evolved on whether companies – and in particular executives – are ready to cede control when they embrace open innovation.

My first reaction was to question whether executives have ever had real control of their companies. Perhaps this was just an illusion of control? Either way it does not really matter, as it is certain that they are losing control now and this will pick up in the future.

One reason for this is the fast pace of change. The ability to control everything slows down an organization and there is no time for this any longer. We need to let...

Building Open Innovation Capabilities at Small Companies

by Stefan Lindegaard

One of the challenges small companies need to tackle when they considering engaging in open innovation is getting employees up to speed on the skills that are required to be part of an open innovation team. These include skills in collaboration, team building and communication.

Depending on how a small company operates, people are often asked to tackle problem solving on their own rather than engaging in team efforts. So opportunities may be far and few between for building the skills that will make people effective as part of an open innovation team.

One solution to this problem could be to ask your people to try working as experts or solution providers on teams at open innovation intermediaries such as IdeaConnection and to...

Good Reads on Innovation #25

by Stefan Lindegaard

Here comes a list of blog posts and articles on innovation that I have enjoyed in the last couple of weeks. I hope you will enjoy this as well. You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard

New Ideas Are a Short Trip Away by MTHarvey http://bit.ly/hZGnCZ – good insights by Tom Kelley

GREAT READ When Your Best Customers Really Aren’t by M. Schrage http://bit.ly/gO63nt

Getting Help with Open Innovation – new report by Ifm Cambridge http://bit.ly/gy1qtm

16 Tactics for Building an Audience via Social Media by Mike Brown http://bit.ly/ezDplf

Mastering the Art of Executive Engagement by Jeneanne Rae http://bit.ly/coqLPD

Open innovation in pharma industry by @jefftoney http://tinyurl.com/2cxsaxf

Running Your Own Race: Overcoming...

Five Ways To Get Smarter On Open Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

I believe the best way to get smarter and acquire new knowledge on innovation is through articles and blog posts rather than reading books. It is just my experience that it works better both in terms of value and time spent.

Let’s say you want to learn about open innovation. I would advice you to follow these five steps in order to understand what open innovation is and decide whether it is relevant for your situation.

1. Sign-up for Twitter and get TweetDeck which is an application that helps you stay in touch with what is happening right now. Use the search function and enter the keywords you want to follow – in this case open innovation and perhaps also words such as crowd-sourcing...

This Little Piggy – Become the Only Ones

I really like the cartoons and writings by Tom Fishburne, and I am glad that he has given us the permission to enjoy his work here at 15inno.com.

This Little Piggy by Tom Fishburne

As Jerry Garcia once said, “You do not merely want to be considered the best of the best. You want to be the only ones who do what you do.” That quote was part of Rule #24 in Alan Webber‘s inspiring Rules of Thumb book, and partly inspired this cartoon (except I played with toes, not thumbs).

The vast majority of innovations launched each year are “me too’s”. It’s very tempting to drive by the rear view mirror, with your eyes on the competition...

Get Updated on Open Innovation, Join the CoDev Conference

by Stefan Lindegaard

Chuck Frey runs the great innovation resource site, Innovationtools which is definitely worth checking out. We both attended the CoDev conference last year and we share the same positive views on the conference.

Thus, I took the opportunity to ask for his permission to repost his interview with the CoDev chairperson, Cheryl Perkins. Here it comes:

Chuck Frey interviews Cheryl Perkins on CoDev 2011

In January of this year, I attended the CoDev open innovation conference for the first time. I was quite impressed with its content and the great stories the presenters shared about the challenges and opportunities they have experienced in making open innovation a core competency in their organizations. I’ll definitely be attending CoDev 2011.

To...