Managing innovation - creating value from ideas

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...

Send us a textMetacognition. Sounds a good word and it's certainly an important one. The dictionary defines it as ‘thinking about thinking’, self-awareness, our ability to oversee what we are thinking and doing. It’s not a new idea - the Greeks had it pretty much nailed (literally) to the arch over their oracle at Delphi. If you want advice on how to approach an uncertain future begin with this re...

Send us a textDiving deep for innovationFor many years Gavin McClafferty was Innovation Manager with Subsea 7, a major player in the highly specialised world of deep-sea engineering services. Laying down and looking after pipelines and cables thousands of feet below the surface of some of the world’s roughest water poses plenty of innovation challenges. And solving them is something which requires...

Send us a textWe often talk about innovation being a survival issue - but in the context of humanitarian aid it takes on a very literal meaning. Crises, whether natural or man-made, require rapid problem solving if agencies and aid workers are to avoid the huge negative impacts of such disasters. For a long time humanitarian innovation (HI) took place in a responsive mode, often on an ad-hoc basis...

Send us a textAmongst all of the interest in platform models it’s worth looking at the potential they might have for social innovation. Can we create an ecosystem to help enable better linkage between social needs and means, one which allows the development of innovations across it? There’s a lot of talk about ‘getting back to normal’ after the pandemic. And whilst that’s something we fervently wi...

Send us a textContinuing my quest to put key innovation management themes to music, here's another song. Lyrics below: You like to think you’re sitting on top of your technology Your gadgets are smart and cool ‘cos you do lots of R and DYour software’s fast - your data’s the bestYour packaging’s great - you can ignore the restThere’s only one problem left at your doorFolks don’t want your product...