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...

Defining User-Driven And Open Innovation – And The Role Of Consultants

User-driven and open innovation mean different things to many people. So how should consultants guide their clients on this?

This became one of the key issues in a discussion that followed my Why User-Driven Innovation Should Not Be Confused With Open Innovation post.

I argued that these two types of innovation are related, but not the same. I also argued that open innovation and user-driven innovation already have too many different meanings and definitions making it useless for academics and consultants to drive ONE definition for these terms.

As a comment to this, Ellen Di Resta suggested that we should “view user-innovation and open innovation as approaches. Thinking of it that way, then it’s the application of an approach that needs to be tailored to each specific context.”

Ellen also...

Open Innovation And Intrapreneurship For Small And Medium Sized Companies

I have been asked to present my views on how small and medium-sized companies can move to the next level by implementing open innovation and intrapreneurship.

I am still working on the presentation, but below you can see some bullet-points I plan to include in the 3 hour-long session. What do you think? Am I missing something important?

Besides hearing your comments here, it would be great to get out and share this with other companies, organizations and event organizers around the world. Let me know if you would like to discuss this

• The challenge. Growing a startup is very much about executing on a great product, idea or technology. However, as the company grows focus tend to shift towards control rather than keeping the visionary thinking and...

Is Open Innovation On Its Way Down?

Last week, I had a meeting with a high-level and very capable business person. She was wondering whether we have gone through a hype cycle on open innovation and now sees a downturn.

Too many companies started open innovation initiatives and they are now getting disillusioned as the results lack. Boeing was quoted as an example. They got into open innovation as part of their supply chain efforts related to building the 787 Dreamliner. Boeing have big problems on this and Boeing has retrenched a bit on their openness.

I do not think open innovation is on the way down. On the contrary, there is lots of potential to be unleashed. Of course, Boeing needs to rethink their strategies when the product is more than two years...

Must Read: Great Report on Open Innovation

The University of Cambridge just released a report which is the product of two years of research within the Cambridge Open Innovation Network. It provides an overview of existing approaches to open innovation and outlines how a company can start to implement a strategy to match the organization’s needs.

The content focuses on:

• What does open innovation mean?

• Enablers and obstacles to open innovation

• How to build an open innovation culture

• How to acquire open innovation skills

• How to motivate employees

• How does this all fit together? A framework

I have skimmed it and it looks great. This is a must read for me in the coming days. It should be for you as well if you are serious about open innovation.

Download: How to implement open innovation

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Nokia And Open Innovation: A Good Match?

I have always respected Nokia which I consider to be a quite innovative company. Lately, I have been wondering how they approach open innovation so I did some research on their activities.

First, let’s take a look at how Nokia defined open innovation in a presentation given by Kari-Pekka Estola, VP, Nokia Research Center in 2007.

“The sourcing, integration, and development of product and business system innovations through win-win external partnerships to capture maximum commercial value for R&D investment.”

Kari-Pekka Estola also argued that open innovation is a critical trend and not yet another management fad due to these reasons:

• Innovation happens in smaller companies, global innovation hotspots and increasingly influential user communities.

• Several factors such as workforce mobility and venture capital are eroding the ability of corporate research...

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...

A Presentation On Identifying And Developing Innovation Leaders And Intrapreneurs

Last week, I held a 3 hour corporate session giving my input on how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation and some thoughts on the current innovation environment.

It was a great session with lots of discussion and interactions. This is what I like although it means we did not get through all of the below topics that I would have liked to discuss with this great group. The topics were:

• business plan competitions • idea management • corporate antibodies • traits and skills needed for the future • why networking matters • open innovation • the broken model of innovation • career development for innovation leaders and intrapreneurs

Take a look at the presentation and let me know if you like to discuss some of these topics here on the blog...

Steps for Implementing Open Innovation: Recommendations from Our Community

You are the innovation leader in your company. You want to implement open innovation. Which actions should you take and in which order? What are your key barriers?

I posted these questions through LinkedIn groups a couple of months ago. Maarten Meijer, Amanda Heath, Gordon McLeod, Lee Sellenraad and others helped with feedback that I have incorporated in this blog post. Thanks for your help, guys!

We all seemed to agree that top management involvement is important. I have often said that you need to align your innovation strategy with the overall corporate strategy. This is also a great way to involve top management in your innovation efforts. This also applies when you work to implement open innovation into your strategies. Perhaps even more as open innovation...