You Always Have to Sell Innovation!

by Stefan Lindegaard

As an innovation leader or intrapreneur, you always have something to sell. In the end it is a product or a service, but during the development of a revenue-generator, you have to sell a vision to internal and external stakeholders.

You communicate that vision by:
•   Developing a value proposition that can be adapted for various stakeholders, and then
•   Capturing the very essence of the value proposition in a short and brief elevator pitch that focuses on the recipients of the message.

In Geoffrey Moore’s classic book, Crossing the Chasm, he provides the term “value proposition” as a way to choose from among what is presented to us for consideration. Options include choosing nothing at all, if there are no choices that...

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...

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...

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...

Philips: An Open Innovation Company

by Stefan Lindegaard

Many companies have learnt that the key element of open innovation is not a fancy portal or destination site, but the infrastructure within the company. The real work happens behind the scene and my interactions with Philips tell me that they are doing a good job here.

They seem to understand that open innovation is very much about preparing the organization to embrace external contributions to the innovation process. This is a long, tough journey and it is more about creating the right mindset than ”just” getting the right processes in place.

At Philips, signs of this mindset go back to the creation of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven in 2003. This has been followed with the drive towards external input in...

Social Media for Innovation Brings More Questions than Answers

by Stefan Lindegaard

The use of social media services and tools in innovation efforts bring more questions than answers. This was concluded after a session I led on the open innovation meets social media intersection.

Interestingly enough, only 1 out of 17 participants, who were a mix of corporate and university people believed that the use of social media for innovation was highly overhyped. So it is not really the why that is being questioned; it is the how.

We lack good cases especially on how B2B companies use social media for innovation. The cases we discussed/liked at the session were IBM’s Innovation Jam, Psion’s Ingenuity Working, LEGO Cuusoo and GE’s Ecomagination Challenge.

I have no doubt other cases will...

You Gotta Love Lego – Crowdsourcing meets Open Innovation!

by Stefan Lindegaard

Yes, you gotta love Lego! Not only is the company doing amazingly well during this ”crisis”; they are also constantly experimenting with new ways of working together with partners.

Their new thing is Lego Cuusoo. Here Lego has teamed up with Cuusoo, which is a Japanese pioneer of user innovative product design that introduced a design-to-order process already in 1998.

This image gives you a good explanation of the project:

Sofar only 1 project has been realized, but once Lego Cuusoo expands beyond Japan and thus activates the huge international fan base, this could turn into an interesting vehicle for Lego.

I think this is a great example on how crowdsourcing/co-creation (users create projects, try to get support) mixes with...

Direction, Training and Time – Requirements for Success

by Stefan Lindegaard

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Open Innovation Meets Social Media in Bergen, Norway. One question went like this: What can be done to enable organizations to extract value out of social media?

The question got me to think back on an encounter I had with an executive a few years back. I had just given a presentation that among other topics touched upon how networking is becoming an important element for creating an innovation culture. During this talk, I pointed out that successful networking efforts at a corporate level require a strategic reason that sets the direction, the training and education of employees and the time needed for employees to build and nurture networks.

After the talk, I spoke with the executive...