Innovation and Organizational Culture

By on February 14, 2015

Recently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has published key findings of their latest “Most Innovative Companies 2014” survey. Beside the annual ranking, headed by the top three companies Apple, Google and Samsung, some insightful outcomes with regard to organizational and cultural requirements have striked my eye. According to BCG’s research, successfully innovating companies approach innovation as a system. The system is rooted in experimentation, […]

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One Size Doesn’t Fit All Innovation

By on January 7, 2015

Yesterday, I was quite delighted to see my post Integrating Lean Startup and Design Thinking ranked #11 of the Top 100 Innovation Posts 2014 at Innovation Excellence. Once again, I was pondering why this post has been by far the most resonating one I’ve written up to now. My conclusion: many of us are aware that innovation tools, even up-to-date ones, have a limited scope […]

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Distinct Approaches to Business Model Innovation

By on October 23, 2014

(amended, 2015-05-03) Business model innovation (BMI) is becoming ever more important as it turns out increasingly difficult for companies to differentiate based on products and services alone. New business models are difficult for competitors to copy, not only because it takes considerable time and effort to build a new business model and simultaneously change several elements of an existing one, respectively. Moreover, a […]

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Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 3

By on August 1, 2014

This is part three of a three-parts article co-written with innovation-3‘s Frank Mattes.   The first part highlighted that radical and incremental innovation build on two different innovation set-ups (exploration and exploitation, respect. The second part showed in a sample of seven leading firms that ambidexterity is used in two main types – contextual and structural ambidexterity. […]

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Leveraging New Ventures for Innovation

By on July 21, 2014

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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Customer Orientation Effects on Innovation

By on May 26, 2014

There is a lot of dicussion around how customer orientation effects innovation. The most extreme assertion is to “ignore the customer” in order to not becoming distracted from true innovativeness by getting too close to customers, limiting innovation to incremental new offerings.  A research paper by V. Govindarajan, P. K. Kopalle and E. Danneels studies the effects of customer […]

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Innovation Success Requires Integrated Approaches

By on May 3, 2014

The resonance to my recent post on integrating Lean Startup and Design Thinking features to a combined process has been stunning. It really seems to have hit a nerve! Interestingly, it looks like others support the idea of balancing and combining elements of both innovation approaches, too. A couple of days after having had published my post, Paolo Lorenzoni from IDEO confirmed the complementary nature […]

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Balancing Large and Small Firm Capabilities

By on March 16, 2014

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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Integrating Lean Startup and Design Thinking

By on February 1, 2014

Both Lean Startup and Design Thinking are promising approaches in order to target innovation. The Lean Startup concept is an appropriate choice for creating new businesses through development of an already existing idea or vision. Design thinking, on the other hand, might be preferred if the right business idea has not been found yet and customer needs or problems are still vague. Therefore, […]

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Managing Innovation Portfolios – Part 2: Operational Portfolio Management

By on October 26, 2013

This is part two of a two-parts article co-written with Kevin McFarthing from Innovation Fixer. The first part can be found here.   In our previous post, we discussed how Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) ensures that the content of the portfolio is driven by innovation strategy and associated targets. We would now like to move on to […]

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