On May 10-11, 2014 innovation-3’s Frank Mattes will facilitate a 1.5 days Masterclass for alumni of the Dresden International University. These work for large multinational firms as well as for SMEs. The event has a B2B focus and is also open for non-alumni (more information below). In designing the agenda, we followed our proven approach for a Senior Management workshop …
Balancing radical and incremental innovation via organizational ambidexterity
This is part 1 of a 2-part article co-written by innovation-3’s Frank Mattes and Ralph-Christian Ohr from Integrative Innovation. In this 2-part article we are showing the need for organizational ambidexterity, introduce the concept, show how it can be implemented and provide two case studies from leading German firms. . Radical and incremental innovation – two types of innovation At …
New publication: Achieving excellence in Open Innovation
Business + Innovation, the Executive magazine of the German research foundation Steinbeis, just published an article from innovation-3’s Frank Mattes on “Achieving excellence in Open Innovation”. This article, that Frank Mattes co-wrote with Dr. Philip Wagner from RWTH university at Aachen, explains why leading firms are opening up their innovation activities, which strategies they pursue and what makes up excellence …
Integration of B2B customers in Open Innovation
It is now 10 years since Henry Chesbrough published his groundbreaking book on the “new imperative for creating and profiting from technology”. A lot of insight has been generated since then about how firms could win the innovation race by leveraging the expertise of a connected world with exponentially growing and globally distributed knowledge. Probably the largest part of material …
New publication: “How to make Open Innovation work for your R&D”
innovation-3 is very pleased to announce a new publication which has been published on InnovationManagement, the leading online magazine for innovation practitioners. The title: “How to make Open Innovation work for your R&D” As we all know, Open Innovation is in the top spots of the agenda for many innovation managers. Making the transition from closed to open innovation (which …
Open Innovation in Germany: The 2011 agenda
2011 has started with a huge uptake in Open Innovation in Germany. Firms are investing much more energy and budget for innovating their innovation management than they did last year. Based on discussions and projects within Germany’s largest firms and a formal questionnaire sent out to 80 German Open Innovation managers I see six issues on the German 2011 Open …
Report from the flagship conference on Open Innovation in Germany – Part II
The first day of this year’s German flagship conference on Open Innovation in Frankfurt that I set up together with Handelsblatt, the leading German business daily, was on R&D-driven Open Innovation. 12 speeches were made.
Open Innovation conquers the whole value chain
Last week I had two very interesting discussions with two global companies that are far advanced in implementing Open Innovation. One of these companies is the lighting division (let’s call it ‘Lighting corp’ for the sake of confidentiality) of a world-leading electro-technical MNC, the other one a globally leading FMCG company (let’s call it ‘FMCG corp’). These discussions took place …
How to Make Cross-Industry, Cross-Science Innovation Work
Many companies have already discovered that breakthrough innovation needs openness to for cross-industry and cross-science approaches, and especially for new industries. The big question, the answer to which is worth millions of Euros, is how to do it. In a 16-page case study (published here) I analyzed how InnovationLab is attempting to find an answer. InnovationLab is an innovation consortium of …
How to be world-class in R&D-driven Early Stage innovation
Currently I am running an exciting project with one of the 30 companies listed on the prime German stock exchange. The client’s question was how to redesign the „technology push“ side of the Early stage innovation (before Gate 1 of the existing Stage Gate process) in a way that it could be a global benchmark. In order to be world-class, …
The true value of collaboration platforms
A couple of days ago I spent a day with 40 top innovation managers and experts at BrightIdea’s Birds Of A Feather EMEA event in Zurich. The practitioners came from leading companies such as UBS, Sony Ericsson, Philip Morris, SWIFT, Merck and Genzyme. I hosted a lively round-table discussion on the questions “What makes up an Open Innovation culture and …
Open Innovation ecosystems: Why they matter and how to manage them
Last week I had an interesting one-day workshop with Open Innovation managers from 15 leading companies, among them innovation leaders such as Lufthansa, SAP, Beiersdorf, Bosch and Wacker Chemicals . The topic that brought us together was “(Open) Innovation ecosystems”. Our discussion started with the observations that a good deal of breakthrough / leap-frog innovations are in essence ecosystem innovations …
Apple’s iPad: The Blank Slate approach for creating a category
A couple of days ago I was in Hamburg. There at the airport I was addressed by a young lady who wanted sell a credit card from an English bank to me. What raised my real interest though was that this lady was using an iPad to enter the data of potential buyers. This iPad was hooked up to a …
A role model for cross-industry innovation: The German textile industry
Smart textiles and fibers are a success story in Germany these days. Additionally they provide excellent case studies in cross-industry and cross-science innovation. Some years ago, the German textile industry was a sad story. Around 800,000 jobs in this industry were lost since the early seventies and only one out of seven companies survived. Yet the German textile industry with …
The failure of Google wave – and the lessons
Harvard Business Review recently analyzed why Google decided to shut down Wave just a year after its launch. In the view of HBR, the main reason was that Google was not able to figure out before hand if there would be a market for Wave. In this article, Google recived credits for having measurable criteria for killing projects. In my …