Perspectives on Innovation

InnoCentive hosted a webinar featuring our very own Dwayne Spradlin and Alph Bingham, co-authors of the recently published book, The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise.

To view a replay of the webinar, please click here. And to download a chapter of the book, click here.

During this live event, which gathered hundreds of participants from Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, Dwayne and Alph discussed what motivated them to write the book, the importance of Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) and other key open innovation principles, real-world case studies of CDI in action, and how companies can evolve into true Challenge Driven Enterprises.

Audience Polling Results

We asked several polling questions of the audience during the event. Here’s a snapshot of the questions and the participants’ answers:

What are the biggest innovation challenges you face today? (check all)

43% – Measuring the success of your innovation efforts

41% – Time-to-market with new products

33% – Lack of funding and resources

30% – Balancing risk and reward

15% – Increasing cost with diminishing returns

Analysis: Unsurprisingly, time-to-market was a top answer. Yet innovation measurement trumped time-to-market, which is indicative of the difficulty companies face in measuring the success of their various initiatives. Alph dives deeper into this topic in his blog post. (more…)

By David Ritter, Chief Technology Officer, InnoCentive

In this post, I’d like to build on my previous comments regarding the similarities between Open Innovation and Strategic Sourcing.  I think this metaphor can help executives understand the imperatives and challenges they face when considering their innovation strategy.

To compete in the global economy, companies need to establish core capabilities that enable them to take advantage of their scale.  Strategic sourcing is a classic example – manufacturing companies aggregate their demand across their factories for materials and negotiate with vendors from a position of strength and volume.  Sometime after 1960, strategic sourcing became a competitive necessity.  Companies that make stuff in any volume absolutely had to create the organization, processes, and culture that enable strategic sourcing, or they’d be driven out of business by others that had built this capability. (more…)

InnoCentive Innovation Expansion Manager Chad Carrington spoke with E&P Editor Judy Murray about InnoCentive’s Oil & Gas Symposium in Houston, Texas on November 17th, 2010.

During last month’s Oil & Gas Symposium, E&P Editor Judy Murray made the point that as the oil and gas industry faces greater and more exacting technical challenges, it becomes more important to be able to innovate rapidly.  In a follow-up E&P article online, Judy emphasized that this reality has become increasingly difficult, with the notable gap between the aging experienced resources and those newly hired to the industry.  For more event details, see Judy Murray’s perspective in the following article,  Open collaboration takes a giant leap forward.

In an effort to mitigate the risks, the industry trend has been to organize for more effective collaboration in an effort to more efficiently address escalating field intelligence requirements.  Today, leaders are learning that timely viable solutions can be found well beyond traditional industry sources when diverse resources are engaged in a structured Challenge-driven approach.  The result is that novel solutions can be found and securely utilized across industries. E&P has been following the growing trend to explore how technology is being transferred across industries and the increasing value of solutions when motivated minds approach a problem from different directions.

Here is an E&P article about the changing landscape and InnoCentive’s participation in facilitating it: Open innovation changes the playing field. Additionally, here is an E&P blog with more thoughts about the possibilities with transferring technology: Technology transfer gets an edge.

- Chad Carrington, InnoCentive

This post, by InnoCentive Innovation Expansion Manager Chad Carrington, originally appeared on the  E&P blog on 11/10/2010.

Transferring technology from one industry to another should be simple, but in practice, it is much more easily said than done.

Engineers, scientists, and R&D personnel are familiar with the technologies they come in contact with day to day, but they do not have much familiarity with the technologies used in other business sectors. Identifying those technologies and determining their application to solve problems in the oil and gas industry is an enormous challenge. The scope is extremely broad, and the technology needed often is very specialized.

Fortunately, companies interested in finding solutions outside the oil and gas industry have a tool available to them that gives them access to specialists from a broad range of industries. InnoCentive pairs “Seekers” who need solutions to challenging technical problems with “Solvers” who offer those solutions. For nine years, InnoCentive has worked with innovative organizations to solve their problems in this way.

As the oil and gas industry faces greater and more exacting technical challenges, it becomes more important to be able to innovate rapidly. InnoCentive helps that to happen, pairing Seekers with Solvers from fields as varied as construction and medicine. These pairings have produced interesting and innovative solutions that would not otherwise have materialized. (more…)

I am very excited to share with you this video interview between InnoCentive CTO David Ritter and Bill Laberis, Editorial Director and Social Media Manager, Custom Solutions Group, IDG.  This discussion focuses on the important role that CIOs and other IT leaders should play in the implementation of a company’s innovation strategy.

In the interview, David talks about how investing in collaboration tools, social networks and idea management platforms is usually insufficient to truly improve innovation. Disjointed efforts usually elicit no tangible results, and often create information noise – indecipherable data – making it difficult to aggregate, rationalize and analyze. Instead he argues for a Challenge-driven innovation approach that will complement existing strategies and investments in social networking and collaboration.

This program is filled with insightful learnings, experiences and best practices that you can use right away! Have a look!