Sandy Bigelow

Developing a Network for Your Innovation Environment

An innovation network exists inside and outside your organization. Inside, certain individuals will characteristically have the traits necessary to form strong innovation teams. Outside your organization, the function is called open innovation, sourcing innvotive ideas, intellectual property, products, services, and processess to augment and leverage your internal resources.

To outsource your innovation efforts, your organization could seek resources in areas that complement your product or service portfolios. Opening a web portal for vendors to solicit your business whereby you decide your needs.

Mapping your innovation environment is the first step. Determine the products and/or services you need that complement those in your organization. As part of your map, look at the scope of the work in which your organization has been involved and develop a tragectory of where your organization is going. Then populate the map with potential vendors and partners your organization needs. Rank the partners and vendors based on your priorities. Once the innovation environmental map is developed and several in-sourcing and outsourcing tasks have been accomplished, evaluate their value in terms of performance, mutual benefit, complementary and respective core competencies, and respective needs and expectations.

Jan 27, 2012 | 0 comments View Post

Theodore Forstmann

All industries have innovative pioneers, and the financial industry had one with Theodore Forstmann, who recently passed away at the age of 71. Theodore Forstmann, with others, pioneered leveraged buyouts (LBOs), which is responsible for not only leveraging new companies, but also leveraging and enabling dormant human capital already within organizations.

Mr. Forstmann is associated with the following quote: “The entrepreneur, as a creator of the new and a destroyer of the old, is constantly in conflict with convention. He inhabits a world where belief precedes results, and where the best possibilities are usually invisible to others. His world is dominated by denial, rejection, difficulty, and doubt. And although as an innovator, he is unceasingly imitated when successful, he always remains an outsider to the ‘establishment.’”

If organizations have such individuals within their ranks, perhaps they will make productive members of innovation teams.

reference: WSJ, editorial page, Nov. 22, 2011

Dec 12, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Barriers to Innovation

What are hurdles to creating disruptive innovation in your organization? Many organizations, including companies, do not set aside time and other resources to enable innovation.

First, some focus is needed to exert direction and space provided so staff (employees and external consultants) will not be overwhelmed. Second, marketing your wares to existing customers is a no-brainer, but getting new repeat customers is the key to growth and organizational sustainability. So look at what product and services your organization provides, couple your product with a service (or vice versa) to existing and new customers to get repeat business. Even adding some educational piece to your new offerring may interest these customers into providing your organization actionable ideas. Capturing the ideas that staff generate is critical to successfully innovating new technology for your customers.

Whether innovation resources reside as a stand-alone department in your organization, in the human resources or strategic planning department presents the first step to getting focus and applying resources to getting new repeat customers.

Nov 22, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Open Innovation is Here to Stay

Open innovation has been used by organizations,including companies, on the vanguard for several decades. The antecedents are large manufacturers that have historically relied on their trusted vendors, then efforts followed that enabled supplier-customer partnerships involving shared privileged data, development plans and goals, to morphing in the current state into a committed reliance on these outside organizations to help in the brainstorming to development steps all along the pipeline to commercial launch.

The use of human capital outside the organization has been found to actually reduce the risks of hiring ineffective internal resources. Outside resources with proven accomplishments can effectively close gaps in innovation potential and contribute to commercialization often limited by internal resources.

By incorporating the skills of the human resources or strategic planning department in your organization, a framework of complementary talent pools in and outside the organization can be developed to streamline commercialization efforts.

Sep 23, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Audit Your Innovation Environment: How Does It Score?

So you are wondering how to improve or sustain innovation performance, especially in comparison to others in your industry?

Conduct an audit. Pick a group of people capable of implementing changes, to map the elements of your operation, the satisfaction with internal and external customers, and set long-term metrics and benchmarks for your organization.

What areas are weak and need help? What areas and people can help others via cross-fertilization of ideas and practices? Does IP get lost in the shuffle? Is the bridge worth building to cross the chasm with marketing?

Optimize the environment and the product introductions take care of themselves.

Jun 17, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

How to optimize your innovation environment: Audit your organization

Are all of the elements of your innovation environment working optimally? Find out what parts need tweeking, streamlining, and optimizing.

The term ‘innovation environment’ is used to describe your stakeholders, internal and external, as well as the market and cultural drivers for maximizing sales/profit on new products.

An audit can identify areas, organizations, groups, processes, and relationships that need improvement, and to define a roadmap on how to get to the stage of optimization.

Apr 16, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Success Can be a Reliable Predictor of Failure

Just think of the successful companies of decades past, ITT, General Motors, Sunbeam, as well as others. Developed and especially developing companies (like countries) need innovation to advance, yet innovation brings about threats to comforts, core competencies, and past successes.

Success is not forever, nor is failure, yet we can design systems to maintain sustainable success. Even these systems need refinement over time.

Mar 20, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and R&D

Ever wonder why the R&D function has trouble “sync-ing” with the Marketing department. Marketing should drive most innovation because marketing has the pulse of the consumer and a sense of consumer trends, and R&D can introduce new technologies that can justify some new product development. Just based on differences in timing alone, Marketing historically can develop product concepts faster than R&D can formulate them for commercialization. It isn’t surprising Marketing and R&D often act as separate silos.

In the bigger picture, Marketing and R&D each have responsibilities towards other parts of the whole corporate organization. For example, Marketing, with feedback from the sales force, has to inform the manufacturing function which products to make and R&D needs to formulate the products in a manner that enables the manufacturing function to make the products efficiently. So common responsibilities to other third-parties within the organization should provide them some common ground.

Sharing essential information between R&D and Marketing and understanding respective needs goes far to “de-silo” Marketing and R&D. For example, R&D will understand pricing and profitability,value identification and maximization, and differentiation and positioning, and Marketing will understand regulatory constraints, product quality, and processing and stability issues. This common understanding of separate needs will help provide syncrony between these functions.

Effective coordination is putatively viewed as a key success factor in competitiveness. For successful companies, new product development represents incremental sales of at least 10% or more depending on the product sector.

Jan 30, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

How come innovation make CEOs uncomfortable

Essentially, it’s fear. Fear of the uncertainty and unknown. What is the pay back, the ROI? Their bosses and shareholders need a defined path to future profits and sales.

Innovation is not an exact science, nor will it ever be. We can assemble the information about the consumer needs, develop and maintain the skill sets required to implement a development program, and manage the efforts according to Gantt charts toward product launch; however, it is the soft stuff, the art, the loss of control when instilling responsibility to others in the organization that truly enables innovation.

Jeffrey Phillips blogs on http://innovateonpurpose.com (January 4, 2011) that the Brownian motion of innovation that makes executive uncomfortable because it is easy to manage and control, requires a belief system, and risk taking that organizations are often willing to support or reward.

Jan 09, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Pace of Innovation

Time is money and innovation takes time. Computer modeling has been used for decades in many industries to speed up the front end of the product development pipeline. Validating and using these modeling systems continually bear fruit, from leads central to developing the product in mind to ancillary leads that may bring new, unforeseen product opportunities. How do we manage leads that are not central to the focus of the product in mind? Do we develop them ourselves or do we “outsource” them because they are beyond our focus and/or core competency? How do we develop them to the point that we can license the idea to bring in additional revenue? How do we handle such technological offsprings to enhance the profitability of the company?

Please feel free to add your comments.

Apr 03, 2010 | 0 comments View Post