Doorways to Innovation
Free business development ideas on innovation and open collaboration. We strongly believe greats ideas are everywhere - even outside the company walls. Both, innovation and open collaboration, are great processes that demand a framework, say, a social network system or a community application approach.
Report from IBM on innovation. (reg req)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
"Innovation is a non-transferable asset.”
- Study participant
"Our 2006 CEO Study takes a comprehensive, global look at a topic that is increasingly important to CEOs and government leaders worldwide: innovation. We knew, from our 2004 Study, that CEOs were relying on innovation to drive profitable growth. But beyond innovation's bottom-line importance, we believed that business and public sector leaders were acutely aware of the phenomenal challenges society faces in the coming decades - and our mutual dependence on innovation to solve these issues.
- Business model innovation matters. Competitive pressures have pushed business model innovation much higher than expected on CEOs' priority lists. But its importance does not negate the need to focus on products, services and
markets, as well as operational innovation.
- External collaboration is indispensable. CEOs stressed the overwhelming importance of collaborative innovation - particularly beyond company walls. Business partners and customers were cited as top sources of innovative ideas, while research and development (R&D) fell much lower on the list. However, CEOs also admitted that their organizations are not collaborating nearly enough.
- Innovation requires orchestration from the top. CEOs acknowledged that they have primary responsibility for fostering innovation. But to effectively orchestrate it, CEOs need to create a more team-based environment, reward individual
innovators and better integrate business and technology.
In our conversations, we found a persistent, worldwide, sector- and size-spanning push toward a more expansive view of innovation - a greater mix of innovation types, more external involvement and extensive demands on CEOs to bring it all to fruition. Based on these CEOs' collective insights, we offer several considerations that can help organizations sharpen their own innovation agendas:
- Think broadly, act personally and manage the innovation mix - Create and manage a broad mix of innovation that emphasizes business model change.
- Make your business model deeply different - Find ways to substantially change how you add value in your current industry or in another.
- Ignite innovation through business and technology integration - Use technology as an innovation catalyst by combining it with business and market insights.
- Defy collaboration limits - Collaborate on a massive, geography-defying scale to open a world of possibilities.
- Force an outside look.. .every time - Push the organization to work with outsiders more, making it first systematic and, then, part of your culture.
By contributing their own ideas and perspectives, each CEO participant has played an integral, collaborative role in producing this study And for that we are extremely indebted. In turn, we offer the insights from this study to CEOs worldwide in the ongoing spirit of collaborative innovation.