Avoid the Toxic Trap: the Toxic Matrix

Avoid the Toxic Trap: the Toxic Matrix

Innovation is the foundation of progress and success in business. A culture of innovation is essential for companies to thrive and stay competitive. One of the biggest challenges for companies is to ensure that the culture of innovation is not overshadowed by a culture of toxicity. There are a number of potential pitfalls that must be avoided in order to create an environment that encourages creativity and collaboration. This blog will discuss these issues, as well as strategies for avoiding the Toxic Trap.

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2 Decades of Open Innovation: an infographic

2 Decades of Open Innovation: an infographic

The rise of open innovation has been a long-standing trend in business. In the early 1990s, companies were starting to realize that they could improve their competitive edge by sharing their ideas and innovations with others. This led to the development of the concept of “open source” software, which allows for free exchange of information among developers. Open innovation is a term first coined by professor Henry Chesbrough in his 2003 book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”. It describes the process of organizations leveraging external ideas and resources to drive innovation and growth. This can be done through things like open R&D, corporate venturing, collaborative research, etc.

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Inneagram: Stakeholder Collaboration in Innovation Ecosystems

Inneagram: Stakeholder Collaboration in Innovation Ecosystems

The story of this infographic began 16 years ago during a Summer School organized by the University of Cambridge. Not in the City of Perspiring Dreams itself, but on the mystical mountain Uludağ in Turkey, with 15 fellow students in a mountain hut more than 1 hour away from the nearest town with cellphone reception. On this mountain, led by Cambridge professor Jim Platts, we took an ESTIEM traineeship in transformative leadership. Without taking a deep dive into the material of the Summer School, one of the models that we started to work with was the Enneagram. Not only the power of the model itself, but also the history behind it, really intrigued me and so the story began.

Over the years, I’ve read much more about the Enneagram. Mostly used in (business) psychology, the framework is best described as an adaptive approach to recognize your own – and others’- behaviour in interactions with others. So it’s not, as many think, a framework for personality traits, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Big-5 personality test. It perhaps holds the middle between these personality tests and the Rose of Leary, a theory of behavioral influence. The theory helps you to find your comfort-spot and from there on explains how your interactions with others happen and could be improved if you learn how to read it. It’s adaptable: it may change under different circumstances, under different preconditions and in different situations.

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Innovation Management Canvas

Innovation Management Canvas

As part of a simulation game on innovation management we have been running at universities and in corporate training programs for over 4 years now, we have developed an integrative model for dealing with innovation management on a daily basis. Innovation Management is a strategic activity that isn’t necessarily needed to implement throughly for every company. Mostly large companies have included structured processes that include administrative stages to following the (large number of) project that are in progress and to be able to follow-up on them and calculate the effect of innovation management in general. For smaller companies however, that is not general practice: having such a formal process in place simply doesn’t weigh up to cost efficiencies will generate. But for them, innovation management is just as important – but they rather use a toolkit than a formal process. Based on our 8 Types of Innovation Processes model this is a useful canvas design that makes it easy to start working on formalizing your innovation activities and processes in your organization.

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ISPIM Conference Porto & ISPIM Grand Prize for Innovation Management Excellence

As a member of ISPIM, we’re proud to be part of the ISPIM 2016 Conference in Porto again.

Organised by ISPIM, and supported by ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação (the National Innovation Office of Portugal), this event is for innovation researchersindustry executivesthought leaders and policy makers.

  • Understand the latest innovation management thinking in 50+ workshops, keynotes, tours and discussions
  • Broadcast your insights to 500 innovation experts from 50 countries
  • Get feedback, get published and share understanding
  • Deep dive into the Portuguese innovation scene
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Trending Topics in Innovation Management

Trending Topics in Innovation Management

Last week, 233 papers have been presented at the ISPIM conference. Although not proceeded yet, the papers and abstracts are already available for ISPIM members. Being a member, I was able to scan all the abstracts, titles and keywords for trending topics. After a few manual adjustments, such as combining words and ignoring research-related terminology I could come up with the following wordcloud. It identifies the main topics that are currently trending in innovation management. Read more

5 Most Powerfull Insights on Innovation Management gained at the ISPIM Conference

5 Most Powerfull Insights on Innovation Management gained at the ISPIM Conference

“If you go from Moscow to Budapest, you think you are in Paris. And if you go from Paris to Budapest, you think you are in Moscow,” as Gyorgy Ligeti very sharply noticed, perfectly describes the location of the XXVI ISPIM Conference in Budapest. ISPIM, short for International Society for Professional Innovation Management, organized this worldwide event once a year. A place to be for everyone involved in Innovation Management, both practitioners and scholars.

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4 ways in which ideas management helps innovation flourish

4 ways in which ideas management helps innovation flourish

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

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.

Brilliant Management Advice From Google’s Eric Schmidt on How Google Works

This week, Eric Schmidt posted a presentation on Slideshare about Innovation Management at Google. It highlights the role of innovation culture, creativity, talent and more key elements that every organization that thinks about managing innovation should start with.

Read full article: Brilliant Management Advice From Google’s Eric Schmidt on How Google Works