Marketing Innovation: Keys to Open Innovation Success

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have to admit that I am not always impressed by sponsor presentations at conferences. This was not the case at the recent Open Innovation Summit in Chicago where I actually enjoyed several of them.

One came from Jeff Boehm, who is the chief marketing officer at Invention Machine. That company has other great thinkers than Jeff as you can experience by visiting the blog of their CTO, James Todhunter.

Jeff Boehm shared the below key messages.

• Successful open innovation requires a strong internal innovation framework

• Processes, information and communities should be integrated as three key ingredients for innovation

• Innovation success requires internal communications

I especially liked his focus on the last point and his suggested process on how to do this. It has 4 steps that go...

Innovation at Nissan: All Flash, No Substance?

by Stefan Lindegaard

You might have picked up that Nissan is launching of a new corporate push dubbed “Innovation for All.”

This article from AdAge explains that the idea is to transition from a price-driven, model-specific strategy to communicate with consumers around a broader idea that Nissan cars come equipped with a range of innovative offerings, from keyless entry to air purifiers and smartphone apps, at an affordable price.

The article features an interview with Jon Brancheau, the guy in charge of the campaign. He states that “…the Leaf is the most recent example to believe that Nissan is an innovative company and that’s how we want to transmit our message to consumers, we want to turn it around a little bit — Nissan is the brand, and here’s the reason...

Good Reads on Innovation #22

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

Welcome Failure by Paul Sloane http://bit.ly/bPy6Zd

Consulting companies use social media tools to develop thought leadership positions by Bloom Group http://bit.ly/awnXDf

Lessons from Google Wave and MSFT Kin by Scott Berkun http://bit.ly/dtAxZZ

Beware the Open Innovation Backlash by Roland Harwood http://bit.ly/aiJ6q5

Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures? by Rita McGrath http://bit.ly/aOiSnQ

Innovate, Yes, but Make It Practical by Steve Lohr http://nyti.ms/bLH2U9

Open vs. Closed Innovation: How Much Evil Is Just Right? by David Rogers http://bit.ly/cstQCd

Five Warning Signs Your Innovation Efforts Are Going Off the Rails by VJ Govindarajan http://bit.ly/9mPe3S

Unilever, Cisco, Whirlpool: Communication in Open Innovation by...

Innovation Case: Creating A World Class Innovation Unit

by Stefan Lindegaard

A global and well-respected company in a fast-growing industry wants to set up a new innovation unit. Their current innovation efforts are technology-driven but there is a growing understanding that innovation efforts need to focus beyond technology and R&D.

Creating a cross-functional perspective is a key objective for the new innovation unit that faces several obstacles including:

• a lack of true innovation understanding from the executives

• strong focus on internal capabilities which hinders external contributions

• a lack of internal knowledge on how to set-up such a unit

In this case, I would like to focus on the latter obstacle thus giving us some key questions to ponder:

How can the project team in charge of establishing this new unit acquire the insights, knowledge and skills needed to make this happen?

How can...

Top 3 Innovation Trends and Issues – August

by Stefan Lindegaard

What is happening in the innovation community right now? In this post, I give a quick overview of the top trends and issues based on the interactions I have had over the last month or so.

1. Communication

At the recent Open Innovation Summit, communication in a more holistic perspective was a key topic.

Jeff Boehm of InventionMachine gave a great presentation titled Marketing Innovation in which he argued that innovation success requires internal communication. He’s right and I will share more from this presentation in a later blog post.

At a Think Tank session during the summit, we also identified communication as a key characteristic for open innovation leaders. Some keywords on this were internal & external communication, consistent behavior & messages, deliberate strategy, top-down modeling, confidence to share...

Grabbing Innovation Leadership Positions

by Stefan Lindegaard

I have just read a very interesting report by the Bloom Group on how consulting companies have begun using social media tools to develop thought leadership positions.

Check this link: Thought Leadership Rewired: How Consulting Firms are Using Social Media to Market Their Ideas.

The key findings:

• Consulting firms are quickly expanding their budgets for social media. • Social media will increasingly complement traditional thought leadership marketing channels. • Other social media tools are gaining on traditional techniques. • Running out of content and determining how to use it as a marketing tool are the two biggest concerns about social media. • Effective thought leadership programs use research-based content.

In the report, I liked this snippet in particular: “The ability to seed ideas online in the right LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networking groups,...

Lazy People Don’t Work With Innovation – Or?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I am surprised, baffled and a little bit angry.

Last week, I wrote a post about signs of recovery within the innovation community. In the post, Job Opening: Global Director of Innovation, I mentioned an interesting job opportunity and clearly stated that if you would like to know more about this job, you should contact the headhunter in charge of the search. The post has a full name and even a phone number for the headhunter.

The post generated many comments on LinkedIn and I even got a couple of e-mails. Such interaction happens frequently with my blog posts.

However, these comments were different as they were requests like this “Send me more information on this position.” I kind of smiled at the first ones, but such requests...

Innovation: Can You Make Your CEO Look Good?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I just read an interesting post titled What to Tell the CEO About Innovation by Roy Luebke.

Roy asks an interesting question: If you only had a few minutes to get the CEO’s attention about innovation, what would you say?

In his post, Roy gives some suggestions on what to tell the CEO. They are valid suggestions, but in my humble opinion they are also too general and too vague to really get the attention on this approach. Check the post and judge for yourself.

In a situation like this, I think you need to get the CEO to think about the role innovation could have as a tool to reach the company’s overall goals and objectives as stated in the long term strategy plan.

This makes the question to ask...

Lego’s Customer Interactions: The Future of Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

One thing that defines a strong, innovative company in the future is the interaction it has with its stakeholders and in particular with its customers.

Not many companies do this as well as Lego as you can tell from the below impressive list of fan communities, market places and more.

Dive in and get inspired…

Communities:

Lugnet.org: 3,844 Lego User Group members in 53 different groups.

1000steine.de: The biggest German fan site with 969.000 hits on Google. This community holds the annual 1000steineland exhibition that draws more than 10,000 Lego fans.

Brickshelf.com: A community concentrated on MOC’s (My Own Creations) with 3.2 million files.

Brickish.co.uk: A paid membership with their own magazines and special events.

Magazines and Clubs:

Lego Club: Three million kids that receive the Lego Magazine and participate in local events.

Brickmaster:...

Innovation Dilemma: Open Up or Shut Up?

by Stefan Lindegaard

In a recent post, Where Big Companies Fail on Innovation, I argue that big companies fail to communicate well on their corporate innovation capabilities.

I believe this is a problem as most industries have begun adopting open innovation practices in which a key goal is to become the preferred partner of choice. This requires a significant higher visibility for corporate innovation departments.

Michael Fruhling and Kevin McFarthing contributed with comments in which they argue that companies can still do well with innovation – even open innovation – without communicating much about their efforts.

As you read their comments, their reasoning makes sense and I agree that some companies do very well even though they stick to a low public profile. I just think most companies can benefit from...