Tag Archives | Integrative Thinking

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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Innovation is About Getting Beyond the Idea

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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Future-proof Your Innovation Management: Dual Innovation

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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Hallmarks of Organizational Ambidexterity

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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Modern Dual Corporate Innovation Balances Defense with Offense

This is an excerpt of a post of mine, recently published at Haydn Shaugnessy’s journal “Hack & Craft”.     Modern Dual Corporate Innovation Management approaches encompass two complementary directions of impact: Transforming the Core (by largely changing or even disrupting the existing operating model) Creating the New (by largely changing or even disrupting the existing business model) With […]

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Bad Innovation Systems Beat Good Innovators (Almost) Every Time

W. Edwards Deming once famously stated: A bad system will beat a good person every time.  What was Deming trying to convey with this quote? It wasn’t an attempt to get people to give up trying because failure was certain. It was an attempt to get people to understand the importance of the system and […]

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Organizational Agility Entails Complementary Innovation

Recently, I’ve come across a couple of posts and articles debating on the question: In order to increase agility, should organizations aim to become more nimble across their existing structures or should they capitalize on separated units/ventures – such as innovation or digital labs – being dedicated to initiate and develop explorative ideas and opportunities? Let’s define agility as […]

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Innovation and Organizational Culture

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

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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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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