Perspectives on Innovation

I’ve been thinking recently and have come to realize a striking connection between getting healthy and Open Innovation.  One is about improving personal health and fitness and the other about the efficiency and competitiveness of our organizations.

As Alph Bingham and I write in The Open Innovation Marketplace (FT Press, April 2011), organizations need to be more lean, agile, and innovative than ever in this connected, global, hyper competitive economy.  But why do we even use words like ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ in reference to business efficiency? It is because these powerful images of human health provide us with a shared vocabulary to help talk about the complex world around us and to relate it to our own experience and struggles.

Individually, we ask: Are we fit? Or are we strong enough?  Leaders in organizations use the same language: What is the health of an important initiative? How do we drive business agility? Are we operating at peak performance?  Deep down, we view firms as living and breathing organisms (the word ‘corporation’ actually comes from the Latin root for body) and the metaphor is a perfectly natural one.

I find this use of this language fascinating because the metaphor provides a clue to the difficulty companies have in adapting and remaining competitive.  Individually, we all desire to be healthier which becomes more difficult as we get older.  And while we all know the importance of diet and exercise, we seem to be heading in the wrong direction in many cases.  So why don’t we do more to be active and healthy?  Because it is hard.  It is really, really hard.  It takes enormous commitment and discipline and we are often not committed enough to follow through.  We are trading off a difficult and uncertain future for gratification today.  Sometimes there are other health issues to be sure, but overwhelmingly we opt for the here and now.  We know the consequences.  Often it takes a wake up call from the doctor to prompt real action. (more…)

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…)

Introducing  “The Open Innovation Marketplace”

By Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

We are pleased to announce that our new book “The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise” is now available, published by FT Press.

Over a year in the making, we worked to create a book which would appeal to business decision makers, innovation leaders, and strategists.  Our premise is this: Firms must adapt to survive in the 21^st century.  In this new “normal”, business is global, distributed, dynamic, and fast paced.  Markets are hyper competitive and you are only as good as your last business, product, or technology innovation.  Execution is critical, but not sufficient to succeed.  Business leaders must fundamentally rethink their strategies to become more agile, flexible, and innovative than ever – and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Watch: Dwayne Spradlin discusses The Open Innovation Marketplace

We have divided the book into 9 chapters, grouped into two sections:

Chapter 1: “Introduction”

Every business and undertaking is based upon probabilities and portfolio management. Bets are made every day in every corporation, whether determining the next drug to develop in the pharmaceutical industry, building a factory, or choosing the next CEO. Understanding how to best manage those risks and maximize options is fundamental to good business management, which is particularly true in a world where constant innovation and smart risk taking is the new normal. Effective leaders must balance their resources between efforts of exploration and exploitation. Open innovation offers an enhanced toolbox for accomplishing these things. The purposes of the bets, the portfolios, and the risk management are to produce innovations that distinguish one company from another in the marketplace. To this end, all leaders must engage in meta-innovation — innovating on the way they innovate.

(more…)

By Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive CEO

LEARNINGS FROM THE BP OIL SPILL

As many of you know, the InnoCentive team and InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community mobilized quickly in the earliest days of the BP Oil Spill Crisis in order to drive ideas and solutions into the hands of emergency responders and British Petroleum. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, we literally had calls out for solutions within days. And clearly our Global Solver Community stepped up to meet the challenge. Thousands of solutions were received from all over the world addressing technical solutions to the spill, approaches to recovering the oil, and remediating the environmental and human health impact. Their efforts were incredible and validate the potential of crowdsourcing and open innovation to provide solutions on demand in even the most challenging situations.

You may also recall, that after months of working with BP representatives, government officials, and others, it was clear that British Petroleum would not agree to coordinate efforts with InnoCentive. BP would not answer technical questions from our Solvers and would not agree to review proposed solutions. BP did eventually open up its own call for ideas and proposals. But their approach was far too broad, unfocused, and lacked sufficient transparency (particularly related to accurate technical data at the spill site) to elicit truly valuable submissions. Some argued they were simply responding to media pressure. Regardless, it was likely too little and too late to be make any real difference.

Notwithstanding BP’s lack of engagement, we at InnoCentive were so inspired by the early efforts that we promptly announced a commitment to provide our services pro bono in other qualifying crisis situations and we quickly launched the Emergency Response 2.0 Pavilion. We did this because as an organization we know it to be simply the right thing to do. Of course we’d need to understand when and how to action that commitment, particularly difficult given the inherent chaos and complexity that surrounds crisis situations by definition. (more…)

Coming off the heels of The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in September 2010, the InnoCentive team once again joined The Economist in New York City, this time for a standing room only event focused on Intelligent Infrastructure. This event convened some of the world’s top minds for captivating discussions on energy, architecture, information, transportation, finance, and cities of the future.

The meeting was once again emceed by the charismatic Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global correspondent for The Economist. Among the notable speakers were our very own Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of InnoCentive, and our client Judith Rodin, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. Judith was kind enough to give a big shout out to InnoCentive during her segment (InnoCentive has partnered with the foundation on 10 challenges, attracting more than 5,500 Solvers and 500 solution submissions with an 80% success rate). (more…)