A Model for Dual Corporate Innovation Management

As reiterated by Tim Kastelle in the previous post, it’s imperative to distinguish discovery from execution when it comes to startup and innovation activities – bearing in mind that both purposes are complementary and equally important. This suggests following a dual approach for balanced corporate innovation management. The main objective of dual approaches is to sufficiently separate exploration-/discovery-oriented initiatives from exploitation-/execution-oriented ones […]

The Case for Dual Innovation

The first time I was advocating the idea of a dual innovation approach, here also referred to as organizational ambidexterity, is now more than 5 years ago. At this time it became pretty obvious to me that this concept – academically worn-out but deficiently or not at all put into practice in most organizations – would be of increasing importance […]

Innovation and Organizational Culture

Recently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has published key findings of their latest “Most Innovative Companies 2014” survey. Beside the annual ranking, headed by the top three companies Apple, Google and Samsung, some insightful outcomes with regard to organizational and cultural requirements have striked my eye. According to BCG’s research, successfully innovating companies approach innovation as a system. The system is rooted in experimentation, […]

Innovation and Serendipity

This post was first published at Integrative Innovation.   In a previous post, I have pointed out the importance of diversity for innovation and organizational adaptability. Diversity is a crucial precursor to serendipity. In the Power of Pull, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison emphasize the rising need for serendipity: We need to […]

Integrative Innovation

This post was first published as opening post to my new blog, titled Integrative Innovation.   Some people I’ve been collaborating with have recently encouraged me to open up an own blog. After having given it some thought, I decided to do so. I’m launching a new site and platform titled “Integrative Innovation” to share ideas […]

Four Key Issues in Innovation Management

Ralph Ohr & I met up at the end of last year and talked a lot about the state of innovation. These are the four issues that we identified as the ones that we think are the most important/interesting in the field right now.

Why the Future of Innovation is Open

As outlined in my previous post, sustainable innovation requires evolution and revolution. Over the long term, organizations need to be capable of both moving along existing growth trajectories and creating new ones when the old business matures or stalls. This can be depicted as recurring movement along innovation s-curves. In the case of a new […]

Evolutionary and Revolutionary Innovation

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Triggered by a couple of recent discussions, I’ve been pondering for a while now over the question how evolution relates to revolution when it comes to innovation. In the following, I’ll try to develop my view on this. Let’s define  evolution as continuous and incremental innovations of a firm’s existing […]

Hold Strong Visions Weakly

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Remark : Coincidentally and amazingly, Tim and I were obviously thinking and writing about business model experimentation and pivots at the same time. Hopefully, I can add some complementary thoughts to Tim’s post from yesterday with mine today. In one of my previous posts I discussed the crucial distinction between need […]

The Intersection of Human and Organizational Innovation Capabilities

Guest post by Ralph Ohr One of my main interests is looking at the intersection of organizational and human  capabilities. Business is accomplished through people, thus individual mindset, behavior and capabilities determine organizational performance. When it comes to innovation, a recently published research paper, titled ‘The Bias Against Creativity’ serves as a good example. The findings […]