Improving Innovation Productivity requires "big action". M&A, site closure, strategic partnerships and so on. That is at least the take from dozens of publications.
Not necessarily wrong but just one side of the medal. "Small actions" can have a significant impact on Innovation Productivity as well. Since the big actions are already well covered, this Blog is dedicated to the small topics.
By announcing our next PERMANENTS Newsletter with a short synopsis on a regular basis. By discussing Innovation Productivity topics as they come along on a case by case basis.
Just drop in from time to time and see what is new.
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Project review counsel, innovation portfolio management board, innovation review committee, board innovation decision committee. Project reporting, portfolio reporting, innovation performance reporting, traffic light innovation summary, aggregated board innovation review report. The thread of project control installed by many companies resembles more closely a hawser fit to tow a super-tanker. What drives organisations towards such a control over-kill?
Truly innovative organisations move with time, adapting to new trends of creativity, applying every tool that becomes available in their permanent strive to become even more innovative. Office clubs to boost communication, inspiration voyages to Silicon Valley to learn from the innovation front runners or cloud-based innovation platforms to funnel the creativity of the crowd into the company’s innovation pipeline. If you want to be best you need the best tools. Is that really true? Let’s have a closer look.
Quality tools or quality systems applied to innovation environments are frequently reported to have a catastrophic impact. Strangling creativity, tying researchers up in a corset of rules, wasting resources on filling pointless forms. One reason for this depressing outcome might be the confusion of quality tools and quality concepts.
Intending to outsource innovation activities, companies and their management need to decide on the outsourcing business model to be used. The landscape of available models is huge, starting with outsourcing of small parts of the innovation value chain to Single Service Providers specialising on exactly the required activity and ending with risk shared Strategic Partnerships with companies having the capability to run large parts of the value chain.
Significant parts of the innovation value chain are outsourced to service providers and the proportion of those external activities has constantly grown over the last decades.
Routine business processes like Innovation Outsourcing could be expected to run smoothly and close to the peak of operational performance but real-life leaves much to be desired.
Since innovation success or the lack thereof makes or breaks a business, innovation is clearly a top management topic. Seen from management perspective, innovation is an entrepreneurial bet, gambling substantial business resources on successful innovation and requiring consecutive decisions whether to quit the bet or to continue and raise the stakes. Deciding on the entrepreneurial bet is a top management topic as well.
No CEO or Managing Director would deny the relevance of quality for innovation processes. Few of them, however, feel the need to get directly involved in this topic. An attitude that bears the risk of costly failure.
Driven by the growing investments in the field, innovation outsourcing has been more and more transformed to a sourcing driven “Lowest-Bidder” approach,