7 Challenges for Corporate Innovation Units

by Stefan Lindegaard

What are the key challenges for corporate innovation units? Let’s have a discussion on this. Below you get my starters. Your input is highly appreciated!

Hit the window! The window of opportunity gets smaller and smaller and the time to success decreases. In short, cash cows are a dying race. Corporate innovation units need to hit smaller windows more often in order to create strong return on investments.

Organize for fast pace, fast change! This builds further on the above. Things just happen faster today and you need to prepare and organize for this.

Crack the X! My TBX model is quite simple. Innovation requires strong buy-in from the top (T) and support from the bottom (B), but the real challenge comes from middle managers...

FREE BOOK: Making Open Innovation Work

by Stefan Lindegaard

“Big and small companies—you need to open up!” This is the key message in my new book, Making Open Innovation Work, which is available on Amazon.com.

Yes, I might make a few bucks on the book if you buy it, but since the key reason for writing this book was to increase the awareness of open innovation, I will give it to you free of charge. I even encourage you to share the book with your network.

DOWNLOADS:

The full book: Making Open Innovation Work by Stefan Lindegaard
Text – if  you want to share it with others: About Making Open Innovation Work

SHARE IT WITH OTHERS! Why not give your network, readers or community a free book? You...

The Roles and Rationale for Corporate R&D

by Stefan Lindegaard

Dr. Carlos J. Haertel, Managing Director, GE Global Research Center Europe shared his views on the roles of corporate R&D and the rationale for R&D partnerships at the recent World Innovation Conference in Cannes. Here you get the bullet points:

Roles of Corporate R&D

• Reaching across disciplines

• Spreading technology across the company

• Specialized in tackling the New

• Recruiting top technologists

Rationale for R&D partnerships

Cost
• leveraging resources, access government funding

Speed & Quality
• tapping into existing capabilities & expertise

Get to Market
• innovating along the value chain, tying in customers & suppliers

Creativity
• fresh ideas, diverse perspectives, alternative business models

When Haertel talked about open innovation, he used the below image to emphasize that partnering...

Successful Innovation in Business – A Cultural Change?

by Stefan Lindegaard

This is a guest post/article by Dr. Joachim von Heimburg, General Manager, Innovation & Corporate Program at Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC).

Learn from a corporate innovator with lots of experience and great insights!

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What is innovation? Everybody seems to know – if you google innovation you get 230 million hits. So everybody knows what innovation is but everybody seems to mean something slightly different when talking about innovation.

There is a lot written and talked about vectors of and tools for innovation – knowledge, partnership, venturing, crowd sourcing – in short the bones and muscles to make innovation work. However, there is another,  “softer” aspect of innovation, the climate, the expectations, the emotions,...

Open Innovation, Closed Innovation and Related Terms

by Stefan Lindegaard

When people ask me what open innovation is, I suggest they should view open innovation as a philosophy or a mindset that they should embrace within their organization. This mindset should enable their organization to work with external input to the innovation process just as naturally as it does with internal input.

In a more practical definition, open innovation is about bridging internal and external resources and acting on those opportunities to bring better innovation to market faster.

It does not really matter whether this external input is in the form of open innovation, crowdsourcing, user-driven innovation or co-creation (read later in this post). It is “just” about getting more external input.

This is in contrast to the old model of closed innovation, in which...

The Next Big Thing – and Other Reasons for Loving Silicon Valley

by Stefan Lindegaard

I go to Silicon Valley as often as I can. It is a great place to get inspired about innovation and entrepreneurship as this is not just work there; it is a way of living.

I just got back from a short trip in which I helped a small and very interesting company get a “silicon valley” mindset into their next potentially disruptive project. Hopefully, I can share more about this company later on.

We met with a diverse group of corporate innovators, entrepreneurs and advisors and I took some notes on what separates Silicon Valley from other places.

The Next Big Thing: You might think that Silicon Valley is for tech-companies only, but there are 3 main clusters now; technology (it-related including social media),...

A Tribute to the Corporate Innovators Who Brought Us the Future of Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

Not so long ago, innovation in the corporate world mostly happened secretly inside guarded walls. The dominating mindset was that “we know best” and the “not invented here” culture was the prevailing one. Companies really believed that the best people worked for them – or they would try to hire them. Most people were happy because this approach to innovation worked. Not perfectly, but it worked well enough for most people not to challenge it.

This is no longer the case.

A group of visionary corporate innovators did not believe in the status quo. They started to explore the idea of bringing external contributions to their innovation processes in a structured way. This was a challenge as there were lots of skeptics wanting to keep...