Expanding the enterprise: Breaking the barriers to collaborative product development.

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Global Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning

The Global Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning

Booz & Company’s annual study of the world’s biggest R&D spenders shows why highly innovative companies are able to consistently outperform. Their secret? They’re good at the right things, not at everything.

by Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff

Illustration by Otto Steininger

Why are some companies able to consistently conceive of, create, and bring to market innovative and profitable new products and services while so many others struggle? It isn’t the amount of money they spend on research and development. After all, our annual Global Innovation 1000 study has shown time and again that there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending, in terms of either total R&D dollars or R&D as a percentage of revenues.
What matters instead is the particular combination of talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes — the capabilities — that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts, and thus create products and services they can successfully take to market. This year’s edition of the Global Innovation 1000, our sixth, analyzes the capabilities systems that the most successful innovators have assembled to execute their distinct innovation strategies, and the ways they have aligned those capabilities with their overall business strategies. Innovators that have achieved this state of coherence, we have found, consistently and significantly outperform their rivals on several financial measures.
We believe that this assessment of key innovation capabilities comes at a particularly opportune time. This year, for the first time in the more than a decade we have been tracking global R&D spending, total corporate R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000 declined, from US$521 billion in 2008 to $503 billion in 2009, or 3.5 percent. (See “Profiling the 2009 Global Innovation 1000,” below.) Clearly, the global recession, which had not yet taken its toll on the world of innovation in 2008, finally came home to roost last year. Yet that decline makes it even more imperative that companies spend their available R&D dollars wisely. Our goal this year is to examine the capabilities needed to maximize the impact of a company’s innovation efforts in good times and bad, and to highlight the benefits both of focusing on the short list of capabilities that generate differential advantage, and of clearly linking the specific decisions within innovation to the company’s overall capabilities system and strategy..........

Billion-dollar Ideas: Finding Tomorrow’s Growth Engines Today

To create growth in uncertain times, use this disciplined and market-focused methodology. It can help you discover and distill attractive new ideas and build a business case for implementing the best of them.

by Greg Lavery and Chris Manning 

 

After several years of survival mode for many companies, growth is back on the agenda. But the requirements for success have changed. In today’s conditions — uncertain recovery, limited capital, and many new competitors — companies must find new ways to grow.
There’s no going back to the growth ideas that were bouncing around the organization before the global financial crisis. Executives need a robust framework to help them rapidly develop a long list of opportunities and then choose the very best ideas from it. The process must be comprehensive, efficient, rigorous, collaborative, and focused on “market-back” opportunities designed to meet customers’ needs. And it must be bold — the company must resist the temptation to do what has been done in the past.
Booz & Company has created a methodology for this, based on five lenses used for evaluating growth strategies. The five lenses — share of wallet, new regulations, technology and applications, distinctive capabilities, and business models — represent discrete and complementary ways to find and judge unconventional and unseen ideas. This approach has already been used successfully by companies in many industries and geographies...

10 Innovations 2010

10 in '10: Innovations

By Ilya Leybovich

 

Inventors kept busy last year, creating a wealth of new devices to entice consumers, advance the boundaries of science or help those in need. Here we look at 10 of the top engineering and science innovations from the past year.
While lingering recessionary effects continue to affect research and development funding and many businesses have scaled back on their innovation initiatives, major advances were made in the fields of science and engineering last year. From sophisticated electronics to remarkable structural engineering projects and materials breakthroughs, 2010 proved that limited budgets cannot stop the march of scientific progress...

The Innovator’s Toolbox: Empowering the Next Wave of Difference Makers

The Innovator’s Toolbox: Empowering the Next Wave of Difference Makers

Change Comes in Waves

Paul Saffo: Change Comes in Waves

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

One of Saffo's most interesting perspectives is that innovation moves in phases. New scientific discoveries come in waves, and following these discoveries you have new technological applications that change everything. Chemistry innovations in the very early part of the 20th Century led to new giant companies like IG Farben and others. Then physics, in the second or third decade, and then electronics (or IT), in the 1950s. This is the scientific discovery that has shaped the entrepreneurial landscape over the last several decades. Now, we're seeing big discoveries in biology. And of course these industries overlap. The structure of DNA was understood in 1954, then the human genome project came fifty years later, and the biotechnology revolution is starting to happen.
Each wave of new science creates new technological possibilities, but also changes our own perspective about reality and how the world works. He had some interesting illustrations of biomimetics - using biological learning to create new products and technologies. For instance, Geckos cling to walls based on nano-filaments of hairs that actually tap the weak nuclear force to adhere to surfaces, and there are new products now based on this, or being considered - like bandaids that don't require adhesives, etc.
In fact, for about $5000, Saffo says you can now buy everything you need, on E-Bay, to create your own organism in your kitchen. It's harder than people realize, but it's not impossible. And it will change the way we think about the world, which means we'll discover even more new ideas. He said it takes about 20 years to go from scientific discovery to technological takeoff.

Innovation: Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

Clayton Christensen asked 2 questions in a presentation:

1. Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time (i.e., to innovate again and again)? and
2. Is innovation really as much of a random event as it seems?


His tongue-in-cheek conclusion is that the principles of good management taught in places like Harvard actually sew the seeds of failure and ensure that innovation doesn't succeed.

These are the accepted management principles he faults for the failure of innovation at most firms:
1. You should listen to your customers to develop innovation ideas
2. Focus your investments on those opportunities with the highest margins
3. Outsource whatever possible, whatever is not your "core competency"
4. The value of an innovation can be expressed in net-present-value terms
5. You should ignore fixed and sunk costs, and focus on marginal outlays
6. Large markets represent the biggest growth opportunties
7. Understanding the customer is the key to successful innovation

Disruptive technologies often aren't as "good" as the incumbent technology or product, but are still highly useful to customers. Some innovations make imminent sense in a vacuum but are simply impossible for incumbent companies to do.

The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

Clayton Christensen classifies sustaining innovations as those that continue to improve a product or service, and move it up and up and up along the customer's need. Often, sustaining innovations achieve a quality far in excess of what most customers actually need, and as quality improves, price and margin improve as well. In fact, Christensen says, competition in sustaining innovations has a tendency to increase the price of the product (in contrast to the common economic wisdom that competition reduces prices). However, at some point below this level of high product quality and innovation, there are disruptive technologies that will always chip away at the higher end products.
He had a table showing different companies that had created innovative products at one time, then been successively replaced by cheaper products always moving up up up in this sustaining innovation trend. So disrupting technologies earn their place at the table at the low end - the simple end, the part of the product category that is either not served at all or very poorly served by the high-end products - and then they too migrate up and devour the incumbents. But soon another wave will come behind them. So General Motors had its business slowly eaten by Toyota, from the bottom up. And now Toyota, competing with Mercedes and BMW at the high end, is going to have its business eaten by Hyundai, and maybe Tata.
Now consider green energy: think about solar power. US and European govts have spent about $16b on this so far. But we have big problems - clouds, air conditioning, nighttime. Solar electricity has been 7 years away from cost-competitiveness for 30 years. So is there any hope for it? Christensen said his daughter was a missionary in Mongolia, and she took him into the capital city, and they happened on a bunch of vendors selling dirt-cheap solar panels, shrink-wrapped with rabbit-ear TVs. But the Mongolians are all NON consumers of electricity, so even this level of inconvenience is still infinitely preferable to non-consumption, right? There are 2 billion people in Asia who are non-consumers of electricity and among this population, solar energy is a booming business, with lots of cottage businesses meeting this need.
One of the other issues Christensen promised to cover was debunking what he called the "gospel of outsourcing."

Eight Great Innovative Tools

The Envelope, Please: From Eight Great Innovative Tools, Which Ones Are the Winners?
 
Ramping up customer satisfaction, maximizing the effectiveness of human capital and repairing supply chains were just a few of the ambitious aims of the ground-breaking "tools" entered in the Wipro-Knowledge@Wharton Innovation Tournament, whose final round of judging took place on March 23 in Philadelphia. Eight finalists, selected from among 120 entries, presented their concepts to a panel of judges during the event. We present the final eight and announce the three competitors who came out on top. 

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4470
 

Creative Destruction: Faster innovation through Collaboration

O2ibm

Visit this group Technological developments enable faster innovation through collaboration  The Process of Creative Destruction is moving at a breakneck speed and the process will only accelerate further. All this has created a market environment that is unpredictable and mind numbingly complex. Look at the new online Web 2.0 today products like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. that are redefining the online hiring industry. Under these circumstances the process of setting up a Business Strategy is very different from what has been in the past. By the time the refined Business Strategy to tackle the known competitive landscape is executed, the marketplace will have changed again rendering that Business Strategy irrelevant. Two new important characteristics become very relevant to the organization in an environment where the process of Creative Destruction is faster than executing a new and refined Business Strategy. Simplistic and Agile Business Strategy: The knee jerk reaction by every organization to deal with rising complexity is to complicate the ecosystem and the process of developing the business strategy. That will not work because complex strategy has a tendency to increase bureaucracy and slow down decision making process. Ultimately this will impact innovation. That is exactly the opposite end result of what is intended. The main need in today’s hypercompetitive environment is to build an agile organization structure that will dynamically and proactively adjust itself to the changing landscape. This is possible only when the organization structure is built on the foundation of ‘agile business strategy’. Agility is possible only when the Business Strategy is Simple to understand. So Simplicity and Agility go hand in hand. Collaborative Business Strategy: What this means is that the process of creating a Business Strategy in today’s world is no longer top down process. Of course top management needs to articulate their organization’s core competency and Business Strategy to every employee, and they need to embed it into the corporate culture. More importantly the organization needs to enable every employee to help fine tune that business strategy. Everyone in the organization has a shared platform where they can influence the Business Strategy. It’s not going to be easy but if the Business Strategy is simple and everyone in the organization understands their core competency, then the executives can leverage the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to create an ‘agile’ Business Process.

Strategic Innovation - The AVAC framework (Activities, Value, Appropriability, and Change)

In his book Strategic Innovation (Routledge, 2009), professor Allan Afuah provides us with a comprehensive strategic framework for assessing the profitability potential of a strategy or product.- the value of "new game" strategies -  in the face of rapid technological change and increasing globalization. It's not enough to create value in new and different ways, he says. Nor is it sufficient to merely capture value today. To compete and win, firms may need to rewrite the rules of the game altogether, overturning existing ways of both creating and appropriating value.  The most important thing, he stresses, is that a firm pursue the right new game strategy...

Integrative Leadership: A collaborative model that delivers results

"In the twenty-first century a new vision of leadership is needed more than ever. Leaders must integrate knowledge and talent from individuals in the private, not-for-profit, and government sectors to advance the common good."   Marilyn Carlson Nelson, Chairman Carlson School of Management Integrative Leadership  = leadership that promotes innovative, responsible, and effective solutions to cross-sector challenges locally, nationally, and globally.