How to Advance Your Innovation Career

What can you do to advance your innovation career in times like this? Let me present some ideas and hopefully you can add more advice on this in the following discussion.

Align With Executives. You need to have a better alignment between the innovation strategy and the overall corporate strategy. One way to do this is to make an extra effort of understanding what matters most for the executives right now and deliver on this. See What Comes Next. Once you deliver what the executives would like to see right now, you still have to be able to see what comes next and make sure that your company moves in that direction . The small wins gained by aligning with the executives hopefully make them more...

Five Ways To Get Smarter On Open Innovation

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. Get TweetDeck which is a Twitter 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 or co-creation. This will give you plenty...

Leaders, Prepare For A Networked Organization

What a company knows is inside the heads of its people, and distributing this knowledge has always been a challenge. Yet, now more than ever, being able to leverage a company’s collective knowledge and experience through virtual and face-to-face networks and communities is critical to innovation. So why do such efforts fail so frequently? Here are some of the reasons I’ve identified as I’ve worked with companies on this issue:

1. Time and skills

Many of us simply do not have the time or skills to network and build relationships. Leaders, you need to give your people time to acquire networking skills and the time to invest in and maintain relationships.

2. Focus

A community will only work if it connects people who share a common experience, passion, interest, affiliation...

One Cannot Think If One Is Sure To Be Right

The Danish communications agency Mensch runs some interesting and thought-provoking text-based ads. The last one was titled One Cannot Think If One Is Sure To Be Right. It was a great read and since most of you do not speak Danish I translated part of the text.

It goes like this:

“Have you ever wondered why some people insist in hairstyles, eyeglasses or clothing that went out of fashion at least 20 years ago? They do so not because they are indifferent. Or cannot see that the world is moving. They do it because they want to stand still. They want to maintain time and their own appearance from a time when they felt on top.

We all experience a certain period in our lives where we ask our self...

Work Approaches: Rude Or Effective?

Another week just flew by and once again I had several issues that I did not get to attend. One particularly nagging example is the lack of my responses to the many great comments given on my blog last week.

Unfortunately, trips to Las Vegas and New York took away the time needed for this and suddenly I am facing a dilemma. Should I focus on the past and spend quite some time on the many comments on my blog and on LinkedIn? Or should I focus on the new ideas that springs up and hopefully are capable of inspiring others and starting some discussions in the innovation community?

Of course, the right answer is to strike a proper balance. This is most likely also what you...

URGENT: The Time Box We Live In And Why This Is So

I am pondering on what to do when I get stretched out and run out of time for the many things I would like to get done both on the business as well as the private side of life. I will get into my thoughts on this in a later post this week, but first I would like to share some insights on time management.

I think we can agree that working with innovation you are bound to have time issues. This career is time-consuming. You are being pulled from all directions, and no matter how many items you cross off your to-do list, the number of tasks just seems to keep increasing.

Time—or more likely the lack of it—is something we often get into during my...

Are Engineers Really That Good For Innovation?

I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.

In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.

Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:

“Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not...

Startups Are Overrated: Intrapreneurs Are Better Bets

Startups are great because they create growth and lots of jobs so let’s pour lots of private and government money into programs that create more startups. Entrepreneurs and startups kick ass!

This is the common wisdom in most countries. Does it hold? I do not think so and an article in Borsen, a leading business daily in Denmark provided some interesting facts that support my view on this.

In short, the article argued that gazelle companies – defined as companies that have created growth each of the last four years and in total have more than doubled their revenues in that time span – create more jobs than other company categories. This is not much of a surprise as growth companies almost per definition need people to...

Why Is The Front End Of Innovation Such A Challenge?

In a recent meeting in one of my network groups, we focused on the front end of innovation as a couple of the members have current challenges on how to identify and develop ideas in the very early stages.

I remember attending my first Front End Of Innovation conference in Boston five years ago. Hundreds of people participated and there was a great energy. At that time, front end of innovation was the talk of the town in the innovation community just as open innovation is today. Interestingly enough, the front end of innovation is still one of the key challenges for innovation leaders and The Front End of Innovation conferences continue to attract hundreds of participants.

I wonder why this is the case. Has the innovation community...

Good Reads On Innovation #5

Here comes a list of reads, videos and podcasts on innovation that I have enjoyed and re-tweeted in the last couple of weeks. I hope you will enjoy this as well.

You can follow me on Twitter: @lindegaard

GREAT READ Making the Change to “Proudly Found Elsewhere” – interview with Chris Thoen of P&G http://bit.ly/467gv

GREAT READ The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap And Simpe Is Just Good Fine – Wired http://bit.ly/2TqkZH

Opening communication for open innovation: Should you share your strategy? – PARC blog http://bit.ly/2lLcIn

Big Blue’s Global Lab: How Big Blue is forging cutting-edge partnerships – article and interview in BusinessWeek http://twshot.com/?VTG

Seven Reasons Your Business Should Be On Twitter- blog post by Matt HeinzI http://bit.ly/DJUVb

How To Manage Outside Innovation http://ow.ly/nyxx

To Be More Innovative, Think Like A Venture Capitalist –...