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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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, … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more