Tag Archives | Incremental Innovation

Scaling-Up: The Foundation

This is the first part of a two-part lead article, co-written with Frank Mattes. The – in the truest sense of words – ‘billion-dollar-question’ we are addressing is: How can companies generate more business impact from non-incremental innovation? The solution to this question lies in the middle part of an end-to-end process for non-incremental innovation. […]

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Digital Innovation Units: Recommendations, Trends and Conclusions

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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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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Corporate Innovation Ventures: Separation vs. Integration

Probably the most critical structural ingredient for innovation capability is how new ventures – internal as well as external ones – are to be implemented in the organization in order to get validated and scaled. Should a new venture be entirely separated from the core business as stand-alone venture? Should it be integrated into an existing business unit? Or is it […]

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A Model for Integrative Innovation Management

In previous posts, I have shared my view on important cornerstones for successful innovation management systems. As pointed out several times, balanced and up-to-date innovation management requires organizational ambidexterity, i.e. the capability to explore novel offerings and capabilities while simultaneously exploiting existing ones. In the following, I would like to summarize and complement these thoughts by suggesting an innovation management model that may help organizations to innovate more […]

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Key Innovation Issues for 2016 and Beyond

In the course of this first month of 2016, I was asked a couple of times what my prospects are for the year ahead when it comes to key innovation issues. Hence, I gave it some thought, starting by revisting an earlier reflection: Beginning of 2013, Tim Kastelle and I identified four key issues in innovation management for the time […]

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Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 3

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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Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 2

This is part two of a three-parts article co-written with innovation-3‘s Frank Mattes.   In the first part we worked out why successful firms need to balance radical and incremental innovation. We introduced the concept of organizational ambidexterity as an appropriate way for simultaneously conducting exploration and exploitation, the two paradigms behind radical and incremental innovation. This second […]

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Balanced Portfolios and Business Model Innovation Distinguish Outperformers

Among others, Tim Kastelle (here and here) and Paul Hobcraft (here and here) have recently highlighted the increasing importance of business model innovation. A newly published report from the IBM Institute for Business Value confirms this point, the need for balanced innovation portfolios and some other key issues being outlined in a previous post. I’d like to summarize the main results […]

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