Tag Archives | Open Innovation

Centralizing vs. Decentralizing Innovation

In the light of increasing demand for self-organization and organizational agility, there is a lot of discussion around centralizing vs. decentralizing ownership and decision-making – in particular when it comes to corporate innovation. Therefore, it might be useful to get back to ‘basics’, which have been well outlined by Hermann Vantrappen and Frederic Wirtz in […]

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

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

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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Scaling Up Startups in Corporate Settings

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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Startup Engagement in Corporate Innovation

Recently, Match-Maker Ventures and Arthur D. Little have released an interesting report, titled “The Age of Collaboration“. The study does a good job in synthesizing the global state of play of corporate-startup collaboration and latest findings on success requirements for its implementation. More and more corporations seek to engage with startups by pursuing corresponding activities across dedicated ecosystems and incorporating them […]

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Leveraging New Ventures for Innovation

As pointed out in a recent post, teaming up with startups provides an opportunity for established firms to drive innovation without risking major interference with their core businesses. Particularly, with regard to radical or disruptive innovation, investing in startup incubators, accelerators or corporate venturing increases the chance to get access to promising novel technologies and business models. On the other […]

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Balancing Large and Small Firm Capabilities

As outlined in earlier posts, organizations need to balance exploitation (i.e. development of existing business) and exploration (i.e. creation of new businesses) in order to thrive on the short and long term.  The corresponding integration of incremental and radical innovation can basically be achieved in different ways:   Building ambidextrous and lean startup capabilities Established organizations with larger size usually target at extending their core business by incementally […]

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Innovation and Serendipity

In a previous post, I have pointed out the importance of diversity for innovation and organizational adaptability. Diversity is a crucial precursor to serendipity. In the Power of Pull, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison emphasize the rising need for serendipity: We need to find ways to attract relevant innovators and edge participants […]

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An Integrative Approach to Strategy and Innovation

In my previous post I have stressed why an integrative approach to sustainable innovation management seems increasingly important to me. The main reason is, that modern organizations range in an environment of various tensions and continuous complexity. This situation requires structures, strategies and cultures to be in place that support dynamic balancing of opposing and complementary elements in the innovation process. Recently, […]

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Integrative Innovation

Some people I’ve been collaborating with have recently encouraged me to open up an own blog. After having given it some thought, I decided to do so. I’m launching a new site and platform titled “Integrative Innovation” to share ideas and perspectives on innovation. You might ask: why “Integrative Innovation”? Is this yet another buzzword? I don’t think so. I rather […]

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