Innovation Community: Definition and Benefits

March 20, 2013 By

Great Idea by a TeamCreativity builds success.

If your organization is like most others, many creative ideas are going to come from your employees. An Innovation Community enables this. Wondering what exactly is an “innovation community?”

Here’s a definition:
An innovation community is a community within the workplace where ideas can be freely exchanged. It creates a productive discussion between management and employees.

As this Wall Street Journal article notes, an innovation community can give new shape and purpose to the knowledge your employees already have.

However, many companies aren’t [Read more...]

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Open Innovation – Definition and Benefits

March 13, 2013 By

Open InnovationAs you know, it is important to establish a workplace where creativity and innovation thrive.

“Open innovation” – a trendy term nowadays – can help you do this. But what exactly does “Open innovation” mean?

Henry Chesbrough, the author credited with coining the term, defines open innovation as:

“…the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”

Whew, that was a mouthful! Here’s a (I hope!) simpler version:
Open innovation is about building a system where ideas flow openly from your customers, employees, and other stakeholders such as partners & suppliers. This system allows you to [Read more...]

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What is an “Innovation Engine”?

June 4, 2012 By

Hi there – I’m making this is post to define a term we will be using quite a bit in our future posts & articles.

The term is:

Innovation Engine

Let us define this term now…

Definition: Innovation Engine

In a couple of previous posts – I outlined why we should approach innovation as a process, and how to start building your innovation process.

As discussed in the second post linked above, a good innovation management process takes raw materials (ideas) and converts them to desired output (innovative products & services). Here’s a diagram that depicts this:

[Read more...]

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Idea Management & Radical Innovation

May 8, 2012 By

In a previous post, I outlined 3 types of innovation. As shown in the image below, they are: Incremental innovation, Semi-radical innovation, and Radical innovation.

Types of Innovation

One question that often comes up is:

Can Idea Management really lead to “Radical” innovation?

This is a very good question. Here are my thoughts on this.

[Read more...]

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Three Types of Innovation

April 5, 2012 By

How many types of innovation are there? Well, the answer depends on which book we’re reading!

I have no doubt that if we combine all the books on the topic of innovation, there would be at least 1,683,276,951 types of innovation!

That said, for practical purposes – I like the model presented in the book Making Innovation Work. This book lists a mere 3 types of innovation (actually 4, but we’re going to ignore the 4th one for now). What are these 3 types of innovation, you ask? Let us dive right in… [Read more...]

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