Managing innovation - creating value from ideas

We’re all going to depend increasingly on healthcare innovation for the quality of our future lives. Keeping ourselves healthy, coping with chronic ailments, living into old age with dignity and independence. We all want this — and we’re going to need all the help we can find to help us get there. This podcast explores the world of healthcare innovation and the key role which user input can play i...

The suggestion box sounds like a very old approach to the challenge of high involvement innovation - how to engage the majority of people in an organization in the innovation agenda. .But its successors - collaboration platforms for innovation - carry out essentially the same task. The difference is that they do so in powerful ways and provide a key engine for innovation. This podcast looks more c...

Innovation is all about uncertainty - no-one knows quite what's around the corner. So there's a limit to how far we can plan to work with it - and instead we need to develop the skills of agility. As this song suggests, it’s a bit like learning to dance.... You can find a transcript together with many other resources, video, audio, cases, tools, even some songs - ⁠at my website here⁠

The great management writer W. Edwards Deming had a powerful introduction to his talks on quality management. Pulling out a dollar bill and waving it in front of the audience he would point out the wording: ‘In God we trust’ — and then go on to comment that in business life the same principle could be applied, but with the afterthought ‘…everything else we should measure’. His argument was simple;...

History is full of examples of innovations which, despite their promise, have been resisted by established players – the ‘not invented here’ (NIH) effect. And although we’re familiar with the problem it doesn’t seem to have gone away; there are still plenty of examples to be found across today’s innovation landscape. This podcast explores the new technology of unmanned aerial vehicles - drones - a...

Here’s a challenge. Close your eyes and try to visualise an entrepreneur. There’s a good chance that what you’ve come up with will be one of the usual suspects — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, perhaps some of the older versions like Steve Jobs or even Thomas Edison. But in reality it's not a job for superheroes and we're all capable of innovating to create value - providing we learn and hone the...

What kinds of skills are going to be needed in organizations as they move towards an increasingly ‘phygital’ (= hybrid physical and digital) world of operations? Why are the skills of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship becoming so important? And how might people be trained on a continuing basis to acquire and deploy these skills inside a large international organization? In this podcast w...

Send us a textThe challenge of digital innovation is everywhere. It’s hard to escape the talk of ‘revolutionary impact’ or ‘digital disruption’ or the need for new strategies to cope with ‘digital transformation’. But what’s really going on, where are the big questions we should be addressing and how might this affect our approach to innovation management? This podcast features an interview with A...

Send us a textPodcasts are a bit like London buses. You wait a long time and then three come along all at once! This week we feature more in the series around the challenges to education and training in innovation , creativity and entrepreneurship - the main theme of the VISION project. We’ve already seen that there are likely to be significant shifts across the landscape in terms of technology, e...

Send us a textThis is the story of the development of porcelain, a series of innovations which enabled the creation of beautiful artefacts and a global industry. They represent a kind of alchemy, transmuting a handful of earth into weisses Gold - white gold. You can find a transcript hereIf you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovat...

Send us a textThe development of skills and capabilities to work with innovation is becoming essential — they are no longer the province of specialists but something we all need to acquire and practice. In an earlier podcast we looked at the changing landscape for learning about innovation and entrepreneurship., drawing on the VISION project, a major European study looking at this question. At its...

Send us a textYou don’t get to be 150 years old just by being lucky. German pump-maker Wilo is paused to celebrate its big anniversary next year and it owes a great deal of its survival and growth to innovation, something it has worked hard to build into its culture. Founded in 1872 as a brass and copper foundry the business has grown to become a typical ‘hidden champion’, quietly getting on with...

Send us a textInnovation matters — of course. It’s the driving force behind economic and social change and underpins our evolution as a civilised society. And with the kind of challenges we now face it’s also clear that the development of skills and capabilities to work with innovation are also becoming essential — they are no longer the province of specialists but something we all need to acquire...

Send us a textWatch any group of kids at play and you can remind yourself that this is something which comes naturally. It should do; evolutionary psychologists are pretty clear that the ability to play (and therefore imagine and simulate a variety of situations) developed as an important adaptive mechanism. Kids play because they are hard-wired to do so; reward circuits in the brain reinforce the...

Send us a textSometimes it’s the simplest ideas which change the world. A metal box which can be easily loaded and unloaded transformed the pattern of world trade and the economics of shipping and distribution. Brainchild of Malcolm McClean the idea of containerisation is one of those innovations which changed the world. McLean was a tough entrepreneur who’d already built a business out of truckin...

Send us a textThe sustainability challenge. Maybe you’re a pessimist, seeing dire threats in global warming, worrying about the rate at which we’re using up the planet’s resources, concerned at the way we’re carelessly throwing the litter of our thoughtless consumption for later generations to pick up. Or maybe you’re an optimist, seeing new opportunities in this changing world perspective, shifti...

Send us a textTry this. Get hold of a group of people, mostly strangers, and have them gather at the opposite side of a large room. Now run very fast towards them and, just before you reach them, leap off the ground and let yourself fly through the air. Sounds a crazy thing to do and one which is not too healthy if they fail to catch you — yet it is a typical warm up exercise in the world of theat...

Send us a text‘Houston, we’ve had a problem here’. John Swigert’s famous words, delivered in a voice as calm and clear as the mountain air in his native Denver home. But to the Apollo 13 mission controllers thousands of miles below in Texas this fired the starting gun in a race against time. At 2am on 14th April, 1970 an explosion in the main oxygen tanks and the failure of a major part of the ele...

Send us a textIt’s sometimes easy to forget that even the world’s largest companies were once start-ups. And a key feature of start-ups (the successful ones) is that they are fast learners. This blog looks at the way in which this fast learning, coupled with a willingness to embed and reinforce successful practices, can build innovation capability for the long-term. It can even grow a globally suc...

Send us a textWe need innovation more than ever. But we also need to be able to make it happen effectively, to be able to repeat the trick. There’s too much at stake to trust to luck; we need to learn to manage the process. Which puts a premium on thinking about how we approach supporting the learning of these life skills for the future. How can we enable different learners in different contexts t...

Send us a textTime for another innovation song....This formed part of my keynote session with Tim Minshall at the R&D Management conference last week. Their title was 'Innovation in an era of disruption' and Tim and I were exchanging ideas on how we might learn from the many innovation responses to the current pandemic crisis - and carry some of those lessons forward. Cue for a song to distil...

Send us a textISPIM - the International Society for Professional Innovation Management - holds an annula conference which is always a good place to bump into new ideas and people in the world of innovation management. Unfortunately this year's event, like that of 2020, was confined to virtual space instead of taking place in the fascinating city of Berlin. But that didn't stop it being another sti...

Send us a textAn interview with Henry Rose LeeVariety is the spice of life - and diversity is the driver of innovation. There’s a great deal of research which highlights the value of different ideas and insights coming from diverse perspectives and the power of bringing them together in the innovation mix. But how can we build this into our approach to managing innovation? In this interview inter-...

Send us a textThe idea of learning a craft offers us a useful metaphor for the world of innovation. We know it’s not magic - creating value from ideas doesn’t simply happen when a light-bulb flashes above someone’s head. It involves a journey, one as fraught with uncertainty and nasty surprises as any of my interstellar jaunts. And whilst each journey is unique there’s a pattern to them which is s...

Send us a text‘With every pair of hands you get a free brain!’ This flash of the blindingly obvious underpins the growing awareness in organizations of the huge potential their employees offer in terms of contributing to the innovation story. But mobilising such high involvement innovation wasn’t always easy - until the arrival of powerful collaborative platforms to enable it. These days organizat...