For entrepreneurial activities, those with experience investing their own money in a company know that the organization’s team matters, as discussed in a previous IOI Partners article. This is no less true when undertaking intrapreneurial activities to tackle innovation within a large organization. The focus here is on innovations requiring significantly new activities for the […]
People are Innovative, Organizations are Not
New ventures are completely focused on innovation by developing new products and solutions that create value for a growing customer base. As the successful venture grows, its priority often shifts to excellence in execution with a focus on sales, margins and growth. It becomes very good at doing what it has always done and not […]
Realizing Innovation: It Takes a Village!
When executive management looks to improve a company’s innovation capability, their gaze typically settles on the group of technical folks; engineers, scientists and/or programmers collectively called something like R&D, Development or Engineering. I suppose this is a reasonable place to start, but true improvement needs to extend beyond the technical team as can be seen […]
Executing on Innovation within the Matrix
In an earlier blog post, Cory Hixson referenced an interesting book on executing innovation entitled Beyond the Idea, which discusses different types of innovation projects within larger organizations. While the book provides a good macro perspective on how innovation works in a larger company, implementation of an innovation effort of any reasonable size within a matrixed […]
Does It Deserve to Be Called Innovation? Does It Really Matter?
Innovation means different things to different people. The definitions range from simply a new idea or invention to bringing that idea to life in a market or even restricting the definition to include only those things that achieve significant change in the world. We often think of innovations as things we couldn’t have imagined before […]