Digital Innovation Units: Recommendations, Trends and Conclusions

By on September 7, 2018

The business magazine Capital and Infront Consulting recently published their second joint annual study (in German only) on the Digital Innovation Unit landscape in Germany.  The study analyzed the units in terms of set objectives and their achievements, as well as of the following success criteria: Steering Themes / direction of impact Involvement of the company Methods / program […]

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Innovation is About Getting Beyond the Idea

By on September 2, 2018

Thomas Edison said it over a century ago: Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Unfortunately, no one listened. When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically allot almost all of their time and energy to that initial 1 percent – the thrilling hunt for the breakthrough idea. The real innovation challenge, however, lies beyond […]

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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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