About Ralph-Christian Ohr

Experienced innovation management and corporate development professional. Consulting on organizational and personal capabilities for high innovation performance. Integrative thinker. T-shaped.

Author Archive | Ralph-Christian Ohr

Venturing Activities in Corporate Innovation: Types, Features and Success Factors

By on August 4, 2018

Corporate Venturing, i.e. corporate engagement in external and internal ventures, plays an evermore critical role in fueling the innovation engine of larger companies. Most of those activities have a non-incremental innovation focus in nature, commonly targeted at bringing about radical, yet sustaining opportunities to adapt/extend the current core business (e.g. digitalizing products, services or operating models) exploring novel disruptive opportunities (e.g. technologies, business models […]

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Dual Innovation Ecosystem Strategy: Broker vs. Orchestrator

By on August 3, 2018

Being faced with disruption and increasing pace of change, many established companies fail to keep up. They often turn out to be ill-prepared to innovate under uncertain and time-critical conditions. Rather than going it alone, some companies reach out to suitable partners with the aim to build up innovation ecosystems that complement the companies’ capabilities, competences and strategies. A decisive question is: What types of ecosystems […]

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Organizational Pathways to Business Model Innovation

By on March 9, 2018

For several reasons, such as disruptive threats, digitalization or blurring industry boundaries, established companies are increasingly forced to create new business opportunities, i.e. to come up with adapted or even entirely new business models. Moreover, developing a ‘business model innovation capability‘ seems particularly vital in the light of ever decreasing life cycles. Shrinking life times of established business models are tied to the fact that […]

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Digital Transformation Combines Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency

By on December 13, 2017

In 2015 and 2017, research by Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner surveyed several hundred enterprises, examining both the capabilities needed for digital business transformation and the impacts on performance. Becoming ‘future-ready’ requires changing the enterprise on two dimensions: Customer experience and operational efficiency. [Update 09.08.18] Indeed, this chosen pair of dimensions turns out to be highly […]

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Identifying and Implementing Innovation Measures

By on December 13, 2017

For most companies, innovation has become a top priority. To rate innovation performance, quantitative performance indicators are often used.  Some lagging indicators measure innovation as results or outcomes – such as sales from new products. Others measure innovation as a process, using metrics – such as the number of innovation projects in progress. And some leading indicators track input measures such as the number of […]

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Scaling Edges vs. Transforming Core

By on December 13, 2017

Dual approaches are evermore finding their way into corporate strategy, development and innovation. There are several manifestations at play, such as Organizational Ambidexterity: Drawing on Tushman/O’Reilly, an ambidextrous approach is deployed if a venture is of high strategic relevance and its synergies with core business are high, therefore suggesting a strong leverage of core assets and capbilities as well as an ultimate integration into core business […]

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Scaling Up Startups in Corporate Settings

By on November 17, 2017

This ‘opinion’ on the question “What can startups and incumbents learn from each other and what are the biggest threats?” was originally published at innoboard.de.   In recent years, an increasing intensity in collaboration between incumbent companies and startups has been observed. Meanwhile, close to 80% of corporations and startups have already been or are […]

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Future-proof Your Innovation Management: Dual Innovation

By on October 12, 2017

This article was co-written with Frank Mattes.   Being among the pioneers (see e.g. here or here) in making the case that dual approaches to modern corporate innovation are mandatory for innovation impact, we have recently been delighted about two things: First, more and more companies are appreciating our arguments as the following data suggest […]

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Peer Group “Scaling-Up”: Initial Survey Results

By on October 1, 2017

This article was co-written with Frank Mattes.   As published in a recent post, we have initiated a Peer Group of leading European companies which share our view that Best Practices with respect to scaling up validated concepts (successfully emerging from the “Fuzzy Front End”) to business impact need to be in place to sustainably […]

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Hallmarks of Organizational Ambidexterity

By on August 27, 2017

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you may know we’ve been relentlessly highlighting the importance of organizational ambidexterity as vital requirement for modern dual corporate innovation approaches. Managing today’s business and creating future’s business successfully at the same time is probably the most demanding, yet indispensable challenge for future-proof organizations and their leaders. But what are hallmarks of successful organizational ambidexterity? What do […]

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