Innovation

4 ways in which ideas management helps innovation flourish

4 ways in which ideas management helps innovation flourish

Jan Spruijt
Ideas management could, according to this article, support the innovation process in four ways:

  • It helps organisations to capture, evaluate and progress proposals
  • It provides a democratic environment to determine the best ideas and to show a willingness to consider all ideas
  • It helps to increase genuine cross-organization transformation
  • It helps in creating a corporate shared view on key activities

It may be an advertorial, but at least it provides a nice overview of an under-researched element of the innovation process.

Read full article: 4 ways in which ideas management helps innovation flourish

The world’s best e-courses on Innovation Management

Jan Spruijt

This autumn, we gathered some of the best 21st century courses on Innovation Management for you. While specialist courses at Insead, Berkely or IESE are extremely good, they are expensive and intense. You don’t want to get into the hussle of persuading your employer you’re worth the 50K investment, but still want to learn something? Go for one of the following excellent online courses on innovation (management):

  1. Innovation Management Game – individual course
    The Innovation Management Game is “a serious game for serious professionals”. Their individual course lets you battle against well-known innovation companies worldwide by learning and practising the newest theory on innovation management. According to some of their clients “The key learnings from the game for us were especially the multidimensionality of the innovation process inside a company and the idea that companies can influence their innovation success in many different ways” and “It introduces innovation in a learning environment and it is completely different than just learning theory.”
    The price: €495,-
  2. THNK – School of Creative Leadership
    THNK is a worldwide renowned institute for linking Design Thinking with Business Thinking. It has an online course, Start Innovating Now, “to build your innovation muscle, and come up with real innovations. An innovative real-life course that will keep you on your toes.” Or as someone says it on their website: “I use TNKS’s innovation process and tools to brainstorm new ideas, synthesize them into innovations that scale and then prototype, test and finetune them.”
    The price: €945,-
  3. Entrepreneurial Leadership – Babson College
    The definition of a short course: it takes only 30-60 minutes to complete. But who doesn’t want a glimpse of the world’s best school on entrepreneurship education?
    The price: $59,99

Any other suggestions? Please let us know.

Ten Faces of Innovation in an Infographic

Ten Faces of Innovation in an Infographic

Jan Spruijt

This time, we’ll put Kelley’s Ten Faces of Innovation in the spotlight. First published in 2005, but still growing in popularity, this work focuses on the different roles people can adopt in innovation teams. I’ve created an infographic that is inspired by the work of Kelley.

The Ten Faces of Innovation are:
– The Anthropologist
– The Experimenter
– The Cross-Pollinator
– The Hurdler
– The Collaborator
– The Director
– The Experience Architect
– The Set Designer
– The Caregiver
– The Storyteller

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Barroso about boosting innovation in the European Union

Jan Spruijt

viEUws just published an exclusive video interview in which José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing President of the European Commission, talks about what needs to be done to boost innovation, competitiveness and business in the European Union. Barroso discusses the benefits of TTIP (the EU-United States trade deal) for Europe, identifies measures to improve access to credit for SMEs as well as ways to boost Europe’s skills & innovation, including the impact of Horizon 2020.

Read full article: Barroso about boosting innovation in the European Union

How to Manage Improvisation: a succesfull ingredient for Creativity and Innovation

Jan Spruijt

This article discusses different forms of organizational improvisation (ad-hoc, covert, provocative and managed) and relates them to organization theory. Moreover, they propose an interesting overview of different forms of improvisation (ad-hoc, covert, provocative and managed improvisation) and answering questions like: what is improvisation?, when does it take place?, how does it take place?, and how is improvisation presented?

Read full article: How to Manage Improvisation: a succesfull ingredient for Creativity and Innovation

How Nonprofits are Leveraging Innovation Management Platforms

Jan Spruijt

Last year, we wrote a popular article about the Golden Circle of Innovation and the way that not-for-profit organizations are using Open Innovation.

Recently, another article was published on this matter. To sum up, it says innovation management can help nonprofits in three different ways:
– better funding
– internal efficiency
– unlock growth

Read full article: How Nonprofits are Leveraging Innovation Management Platforms

The Rise of Innovation Districts in Europe

Jan Spruijt

According to High Tech Campus frontman Bert-Jan Woertman, building bridges between innovation district is the way forward. He follows up upon a recent publication of Brookings Institution, The Rise of Innovation Districts, and benchmarks the Technology Region of Southern Netherlands with districts mentioned in the report. So, this would be a form of open innovation of open innovation regions.

According to Katz and Wagner, Innovation Districts are: “a new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling “innovation districts”. These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators. [….] Our most creative institutions, firms and workers crave proximity so that ideas and knowledge can be transferred more quickly and seamlessly.”

Read full article: High Tech Campus Eindhoven – Campus Newsletter

Disruptive Innovation: why the theory absolutely makes sense.

Jan Spruijt

Recently, there has been some debate about whether or not the theory about Disruptive Innovation should be followed upon by business leaders or not. In her article The Disrupting Machine Jill Lepore suggests that the theory is based upon flawed assumptions. Many articles have tried to support Lepore – such as John Parkinson – and many others, including Christensen and Irvin Wladawsky-Berger have tried to proof why it’s a trustable theory.

But the discussion is about the wrong topic: it shouldn’t be about whether or not the theory is suitable, it should be about whether or not theories could ever be undiscussible. They can’t. Theories are build upon models; aggregated from results, averages of true situations and therefore there will always be examples of situations in which they don’t seem to fit. That is the nature of theories. Reality is far more complex than theories could ever describe and business owners and leaders should always keep that in mind before rigurously implementing one single strategy based upon a certain theory.

We should embrace scholars who use true data to gather results, analyse them and draw significant conclusions. But we should even more embrace scholars who have the courage to use their intuition and vision to fill in the gaps – and of course make those steps clear to the reader – and create possible new ways of thinking about ongoing matters. It is them who have changed management and business in general.

Please read the article below for another way of looking at disruptive innovation – and sustainable innovation.

Read full article: Disruptive Innovation: why the theory absolutely makes sense.

Ten Types of Innovation Infographic

Ten Types of Innovation Infographic

Jan Spruijt

By far one of the most interesting books on innovation of the last few years is “Ten Types of Innovation: the discipline of building breakthroughs” by Keeley. At the time of publishing he was director of the firm Doblin, however the firm has recently been acquired by Deloite. The Ten Types of Innovation explain different forms of innovation, bundles in three categories. Because I believe this book should be present on everyone’s desk, I have created an infographic that is inspired by the framework of the Ten Types.

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