Now that the year comes to an end, we have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: Arthur D. Little’s Innovation Excellence Survey found a growing number of companies realise that they have failed to make innovation everyone’s business. And this is costing them dearly.
TIP: The innovation keystone you may be missing
When launching your innovation management effort, you must find a way to communicate that the initiative is bigger than just a simple project. We’re talking about the opportunity to define the company’s future. The opportunity to out-differentiate your competition and, more importantly, to write history together.
TIP: What are you neglecting in your innovation initiative?
You’ve taken all of our advice and built a robust innovation management engine that will – over time – bring differentiation and engagement to your organisation.
TIP: Is your innovation effort transparent enough?
Today the traditional model of ‘top management decides’ and ‘everyone else unquestioningly executes’ is less likely to succeed, namely in your innovation efforts. Leaders need to define strategy based upon established fundamentals and then clearly communicate that strategy throughout their organisation. Transparency is paramount in the twenty-first century enterprise.
TIP: How to duck the innovation implementation void
Say you’ve run the front-end process and have successfully identified the ideas and opportunities that make the most sense to implement, but now you lack resources. As a result, the opportunity falls into an implementation void and you get the blame for the low return of your innovation management programme.
TIP: How to measure idea management intangible returns
Arthur D. Little’s 2013 Innovation Excellence Survey found a correlation between capability in innovation measurement and success. Yet less than 20% of companies believe they have a good idea management measurement capability. If you run a search on the web, you find many different approaches and models to do it … however you might be neglecting much of the real value of your initiative if you look only for tangible outcomes.
TIP: What to do when you lack measurable returns
No returns, no investment. This is an obvious leadership decision and, as such, many in progress idea management programmes have been shut down. The corporate cemetery is full of initiatives that failed; their ghosts haunting the same corporations whenever someone wants to relaunch. So how do you make sure that your innovation initiative does not wither?
Cross-border innovation initiatives: 10 best practices
‘To make your idea management initiatives thrive across countries, you need high levels of engagement, as well as process efficiency to manage this engagement and its outputs’, said Pedro do Carmo Costa. Exago’s director spoke at the Innovation Management.se Channel One Roundtable Discussion, sharing field-tested best practices to ensure international companies succeed in their innovation efforts.
Back to basics: Define appropriate goals
In previous posts, we’ve made the case for purpose-led innovation. However, it’s also true that, in some cases, the ‘job to be done’ can entail ‘softer’ ambitions, namely, creating an innovation culture and embedding an innovation capability.
Back to basics: What is your purpose?
As we’ve seen, the challenge for innovation pioneers came when a more adverse economic climate infected the corporate world. Innovation became a secondary concern, even seen as the cause of the sudden climate change. It had distracted us from our core values.