Core competence management in the era of Open Innovation

“Core competences” are a major concept in managing innovations and technologies. In the era of Open Innovation, the established concept of core competence management needs to be updated. innovation-3’s Frank Mattes recently met with a group of 20 innovation / technology managers from leading firms to work out how this could be done – with the practitioner’s perspective in mind. …

Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity – Part 3

This is the third and final part of a 3-part article co-written by Frank Mattes and Ralph-Christian Ohr. 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 …

Finding from a practitioner’s workshop: Open Innovation meets Systematic Serendipity

This year, innovation-3 had the opportunity to work with a number of leading firms on a cutting-edge subject. All of these firms were basically saying: “We have well-defined innovation search fields. On the one side this is good since search fields provide us with a clear guidance on what we focus on. But on the other hand search fields also …

Core competence management in the era of Open Innovation

“Core competences” are a major concept in managing innovations and technologies. In the era of Open Innovation, the established concept of core competence management needs to be updated. innovation-3’s Frank Mattes recently met with a group of 20 innovation / technology managers from leading firms to work out how this could be done – with the practitioner’s perspective in mind. …

Findings from a practitioner’s workshop on cross-industry / Big Data radical innovation

Recently, innovation-3 conducted a one-day workshop with some 30 practitioners from leading Central European firms (see HERE). We looked at how radical innovation can be achieved via a cross-industry / cross-funnel approach, by a Big Data approach and by the confluence of these two, Big Data-enabled, industry-crossing Business Model Innovations. Within this context, we focused on three main topics: Cross-industry …

Open Innovation in the Chemical Industry: Report from the Evonik in-house congress

Since last year, Evonik Industries, a global leader in Specialty Chemicals, supports adoption of Open Innovation by conducting annual in-house congresses on this topic. According to the Open Innovation paradigm, the speaker and panelist roster should come from academia and other firms – both from within and outside the Chemical Industry. Like in 2012, innovation-3 organized and facilitated this year’s …

Balancing Innovation via Organizational Ambidexterity (Part 2)

In the first part of a 3-part article series (see HERE) innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Integrative Innovation’s Ralph-Christian Ohr worked out why successful firms need to balance radical and incremental innovation. They 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 part shows …

Findings from a practitioner’s workshop on Radical / Business Model Innovation

Recently, innovation-3 conducted a one-day workshop with some 30 practitioners from leading Central European firms (see HERE). The workshop focused on two main questions: Radical / breakthrough Innovations defined In the classical Ansoff matrix, radical (for the sake of simplicity we abandon the “breakthrough” for the rest of this article) are in the “New technology / new market or application” …

Key issues in Open Innovation networks

Recently, innovation-3’s Frank Mattes ran a high-level workshop with 6 firms from different industries on “Best Practices in managing Open Innovation networks”. The participants were at C-/SVP-level coming from Bayer (Chemical/Pharma), Beiersdorf (FMCG), Deutsche Telekom (Telco), Evonik (Chemical), Samsung (Electronics) and Siemens (Electical). In preparing the workshop, the participants were asked to rank potential discussion topics by the importance for …

Core competence management in the era of Open Innovation

“Core competences” are a major concept in managing innovations and technologies. In the era of Open Innovation, the established concept of core competence management needs to be updated. innovation-3’s Frank Mattes recently met with a group of 20 innovation / technology managers from leading firms to work out how this could be done – with the practitioner’s perspective in mind. Before …

Hot topic in Central European Open Innovation: Core competencies

Every 4 months or so, innovation-3 conducts a practitioner’s workshop with experts and managers from leading firms on the issues that really matter within the context of Open / Collaborative Innovation. The topics that these firms are discussing can be seen as an early warning sign of things to come. In the past, issues such as “Innovation networks”, “Merging of …

Collaborative Innovation Inside & Beyond the Firm – Two Worlds Become One

This year, a very interesting trend in collaborative innovation can be observed in Central Europe: The once distinct concepts of “Enterprise 2.0” and “Open Innovation” are merging. Firms are taking a holistic view on collaborative innovation and put the question about whether collaborative innovation should happen primarily within the firm’s walls or with externals out of the focus. This trend …

Report on a cross-company expert workshop on „(Open) Innovation networks“

Two weeks ago, I had a cross-company expert workshop with a group of clients and contacts on (open) innovation networks. This is a hot topic in Open Innovation, at least in Germany – currently innovation-3 is doing a number of projects for clients that are benchmarking their own approaches in designing and managing innovation networks. Lufthansa was the host of …