by Stefan Lindegaard The reason for creating a networking culture is obvious once you look at the current and future direction of innovation. Let’s start by disposing of the myth of the lone genius (the Thomas Edisons and the Alexander Graham Bells of yesteryear) arriving at a breakthrough innovation on his/her own. This model wasn’t true then, and even if it were, it simply does not hold true in today’s complex business organizations. Technology and the challenges that must be solved have become so complex that many, perhaps even most, companies can no longer rely solely on their own internal innovation geniuses, no matter how brilliant those people may be. Innovation is increasingly about having groups of people come together to leverage their diverse talents and expertise to solve multi-faceted challenges that cross multiple disciplines. To make this happen within your organization, and beyond as you move toward open innovation, requires a networking culture that is designed, supported, and modeled by your company’s leaders. Even organizations that are not ready to fully embrace open innovation are finding that employees’ mindsets about networking must be stretched as more companies deploy internal R & D functions outside the corporate headquarters and around the world. Employees start to wonder who should do innovation and where it should take place. Although this is positive, success in such situations depends heavily on the ability of the employees to initiate, solidify, and leverage external relationships. Another key motivation for setting up networking initiatives is based on the simple fact that the knowledge of any company is inside the heads of the employees. Discovering and distributing this knowledge has always been a challenge, and now, more than ever, the ability to leverage a company’s collective knowledge and experience through virtual and face-to-face networks and communities is critical to innovation. Furthermore, establishing the ability to bring knowledge and potential new innovation insights in from external sources demands a strong networking culture supported and modeled from the top. In one of my next posts, I will give some advice on how to create a networking culture. Don’t miss an article – Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Why a Networking Culture Is Important

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A Lesson from General Mills by Stefan Lindegaard Changing organizational culture is one of the most difficult tasks when it comes to open innovation. What can you do? Well, General Mills gave a great example at the recent CoDev conference. By sending more than 20 people to the conference, they sent a strong signal – internally as well as externally – that they are committed to open innovation. I really liked this move and thus I did an interview with Mike Antinone, who is Sr. R&D Manager, Connected Innovation in General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network, in order to get a better understanding on this. What made you decide to send this delegation to CoDev? We had two main reasons for sending our GWIN team to CoDev this year. The first was really around team building. We have added several new team members as we expand our global innovation entrepreneur program and we wanted to have some time away from the daily demands of the office to foster an added sense of community. The second area for us was to collectively learn and leverage the insights and best practices of other open innovation leaders represented at the conference and then create a plan of action to determine how we can best incorporate those insights and practices into our group. What were the objectives? We feel great about the progress that we have made with our Connected Innovation program, but we also wanted to put some serious thinking into “Next Practices” – those practices that we will need in the future to drive our program ahead and distance ourselves from competitors. We did not want to just go and listen, take notes, have a quick discussion then go back to our daily routine. Our goal was to create tangible action steps that we would incorporate into our development plans for our program. We began our preparations about six to eight weeks before the conference. We divided the group into four teams with each team being responsible for a given topic. We chose to focus on three key objectives for our company. These were: Driving profitable growth through Connected Innovation Creating and leveraging more successful partnerships Driving Connected Innovation throughout our company Each team then created a list of questions they wanted answered about how we as innovation entrepreneurs could dramatically impact the three objectives outlined above. Our goal was to collect as many facts as possible. The fourth team set up a series of networking opportunities, both before and after the conference to provide stimulus for answers to our questions. Some of those networking opportunities included: Smaller match-making events at the conference. We prearranged a series of discussions with conference participants. We met during breaks, at lunch, etc. to engage in a dialog about areas we wanted to advance and grow as an organization. Utilization of CoDev LinkedIn site. We posted several questions on the LinkedIn site to gain additional insights and make connections We also made sure we had prepared germane questions for each of the speakers to ensure we were tapping into their area of expertise. Our team stayed in Scottsdale an extra day after the conference ended to have a working breakout session to summarize our key findings and to create an action plan going forward. During this session, we created list of “we-should” statements in our breakout sessions that were then reduced to three major areas of focus for each category as we continue to develop our program. Which lessons have you learned so far? It was very powerful to have our entire group at such a stimulating event. We had many opportunities to interact with each other, build on what we heard, and engage thought leaders with differing points of view. The conference provided us with a great opportunity to assess our program, consider new elements and chart a course as we continue our Connected Innovation journey. Conclusion I am impressed. Such an initiative can anchor open innovation in your company as it provides a great opportunity to build a common language based on what the team learned at the conference. This can really help develop the next practices of open innovation at General Mills. Can you talk your executives into this kind of commitment? Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Making Your Organization Understand Open Innovation

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by Stefan Lindegaard I tapped into an interesting discussion on LinkedIn. Chris Gelken , who is host and co-producer of Today, a live news magazine, asked whether China is an innovative society. Personally, I find the development of China to be both fascinating and a bit frightening seen from a Western perspective. Based on several visit, my take is that if China avoids too many financial bubbles, then the drive and ambition of the Chinese people to climb the value chain ladder will turn it into an innovation hotspot sooner than many think. There are many great comments in the discussion and I have inserted snippets from a couple of them below. Check out the rest for yourself: Is China an Innovative Society? (requires group membership) Zhiyun Chen, Vice President at Pixelligent I think as indivduals Chinese are very creative. It is result of strong natural selection by firece competetion in a closed society. The problem, though, is Chinese society still lacks mechnisms to channel the creativity of individuals into constructive innovations. Edward Eng, Copywriter at Getchee Rather than ask if China is innovate or not, people should focus on how China needs to improve its global marketing skills. The reason why many people think China isn’t innovate is because no one knows what they are doing in China. People and businesses in China have great ideas and products but sometimes they just don’t know how to effectively market them to the global consumer market. This is where China needs to strengthen its innovative juices. John Walmsley, MD at Scot Lift Systems They have the ideal situation for innovation as the Universities concentrate on designing and developing products which will meet a market need and not play around learning things which do not relate to Industry and Commerce. Where there is a gap is in Product design where they seem to lack the skills in making their products look modern and appealing. If they get that right then look out World. Stephen DeKuyper, Managing Principal at CresaPartners My experience tells me an overwhelming “no”. Good at copying, good at driving costs down, but not innovative. I would be interested in seeing how many patents are applied for out of China. I guess it would be very low. I think with the size of the population, it will go up, but on a per capita basis, I think it will remain low. This does not equate to being smart or not. I just don’t think there is an environment for innovation. Bill Dodson, Principal at TrendsAsia China excels at innovation, but not disruptive Innovation. “Small i” innovation is about patching and work-arounds. “Big I” Innovation is about changing the course of markets and even of societies. Chinese culture and history have always been supportive of “small i” innovation, due to the capricious nature of local government policies and decisions; and due to dramatic turns of events – revolts, revolutions, banditry, dynastic dissolution – that quickly destroy the fruits of labor. Hence, the tendency of so many constructions and creations in Chinese society to be just “good enough”; after all, who knows how long such works will be able to stand? What do you think? Is China an innovative society? Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Is China an Innovative Society?

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The world if filled with incredibly smart people. If you can locate them and convince them to partner with you, they can help to drive your open innovation efforts forward. Stefan Lindegaard shares several strategies for making that happen.

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How to find potential open innovation partners

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by Stefan Lindegaard I have often shunned the idea of metrics for innovation as it has been very difficult finding companies being good at this. However, I believe it is important to work this out in order to raise the innovation productivity and in this post I share some input from a couple of large corporations based on a discussion on LinkedIn last year. The discussion was started by Jimm Feldborg, who is R&D Manager at Grundfos in China. Jimm pointed out that a good start is to understand whether your indicator is a: Lag indicator. The results are lagged with weeks, months or years and cannot be changed. Some examples are rewards and the number of patents. Current indicator. The results happen right now giving you some possibilities to act and change and thus affect the future results. Some examples are the number of ideas generated and ongoing projects. Lead indicator. The results are predictive for the future. You can make radical change in your approach and thus affect the results. Examples are pretty hard to give here. Jeff Murphy, an Executive Director at Johnson & Johnson, suggests that innovation metrics (and metrics for any deployment like this) need to be dynamic by design. He continues: Initially, metrics should focus on engagement, training and participation of individuals . Then, as you begin to build a critical mass of capable individuals, the focus of your metrics shifts to your innovation pipeline (active projects by stage, flow of projects through concept, development, launch or kill…) and early wins. This is in addition to item 1 metrics above. Finally, as your organization’s initiative begins to mature, your focus shifts to the end goals – return on investment, successful new products or services launched, revenue from new launches, etc. as well as optimizing your development and commercialization process. This is in addition to the item 2 metrics above. If an organization gets ahead of itself in the metrics area, it can lead to unrealistic expectations during the early stages. On the other hand, if it gets behind on implementing the appropriate metrics and delays getting to #3, it leads to under-performance, and activity without business results. Jeff emphazises that the key is to match your selected metrics with your deployment lifecycle. He also states that there are literally hundreds of metrics that you can choose from, but optimally, 8-15 metrics at any one time for an organization will be enough for senior management and/or the effective management of the innovation deployment. If any more granularity is needed, that should be done at the functional level. Lessons from Intel Personally, I keep getting back to a visit at Intel a few years back. It was interesting to get an inside view of this Silicon Valley giant, but it was also strange to sense how it was driven by control rather than creativity. I did miss a more creative sense, but I take my hats off for their ability to measure their innovation initiatives in which they track the following information. Number of innovation-related rewards and recognitions Numbers from various feedback mechanisms, showing employee acceptance and understanding of the initiative Results from the innovation self assessment capability maturity framework (survey measuring five levels of maturity related to innovation behavior) Percentage of our budget dedicated to innovation, research, and exploration of emerging technologies Shareholder value created from innovation activities. (Shareholder Value = IT Efficiencies + Business Value provided to the IT customers) Number of ideas generated in specific innovation harvesting campaigns Number of ideas harvested from the campaigns and turned into implementable projects Number of invention disclosure filings (IDFs) Number of Intel patent submissions Number of white papers published. You can read further in this paper, Developing Systemic Innovation in an IT Organization , that provides an overview of how Intel works to foster and encourage innovation through its IT organization. Paul Chaudury, VP of Innovation at Sara Lee, mentions that he has successfully followed the below KPI creation and reporting process at his prior job: Net sales from new products. Reported monthly. % of net sales from new products at year 1 and the next three years Projected value of the pipeline . Reported quarterly. Risk adjusted year 2 sales value of all ideas and projects in pipeline. Different probability rates for each phase in stage gate. Average time to market from concept to launch date . Reported monthly. # of weeks from exit of concept phase to launch date Aggregate portfolio net present value . Reported quarterly. Risk adjusted NPV of cash flow of all projects in pipeline from feasibility to launch phase in stage gate process. Paul mentions that most of the calculations were automated and that reporting was done to senior management. KPIs were part of the key annual objectives and performance review for all involved with innovation. After a year from implementation, the process was continuously improved to fit the needs and it became a part of the company culture. I also scratched the topic in a recent blog post, Increasing Innovation Productivity in which you can also find a few metrics used by P&G. Francois Couture also started a new discussion related to this in my Leadership+Innovation group on LinkedIn . Your input is highly appreciated. Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Innovation Metrics of Leading Companies

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In this interview with Chuck Frey at the 2010 CoDev and Open Innovation Conference, innovation thought leader Stefan Lindegaard shares some keen insights on the dos and don’ts of open innovation.

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Stefan Lindegaard explores open innovation success factors

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by Stefan Lindegaard In a 2006 article, P&G’s New Innovation Model , P&G stated that their open innovation program – along with improvements in other aspects of innovation related to product cost, design, and marketing – made their R&D productivity increase by nearly 60 percent since 2001. When I listen to P&G talks on innovation today, the innovation productivity has nearly doubled and open innovation is a key reason for this. Every company would like to increase their innovation productivity significantly so I am looking into how companies can do this. I am still researching and it would be great to have a discussion here on my blog. A few conversation starters: What does innovation productivity mean? In this video , P&G gives us some insight on innovation productivity including this quote from A.G Lafley: “…the other obvious way we measure innovation productivity is how much innovation do we generate per person and how much innovation do we generate per dollar invested in innovation.” You can read a transcript at the link. Which other metrics can we use to track innovation productivity? Maximizing Innovation Productivity In this article , PRTM focuses on four areas of opportunity that offer high potential for productivity and innovation leverage but are often overlooked or underutilized by development organizations: platforms and architectures, resource management, information automation, and cross-functional teams. To which extent does your company apply this? Does it deliver results? What else do you do? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on this. Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Increasing Innovation Productivity

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by Stefan Lindegaard The “not invented here” culture is a problem at Sony. James Surowiecki addressed this in a 2005 article in which he stated that the Betamax video tape recorder failed in part because the company refused to cooperate with other companies. Sony was also late in making flat-screen TVs and DVD recorders, because its engineers believed that, even though customers loved these devices, the available technologies were not up to Sony’s standards. And Sony’s digital music players didn’t play MP3s, which is a big reason that the iPod became the Walkman’s true successor. Again and again, Sony’s desire to control everything kept it from controlling anything according to Surowiecki. Over the years, Sony CEO Howard Stringer has been working hard to crack this staunch “not invented here” culture. As the company bets big on a 3-D revival, it seems as if they starting to get it. In a Wall Street Journal article, Stringer says that getting to market quickly takes priority over making everything in house. This led to Sony reaching a licensing deal with an outside supplier for an essential component of 3-D televisions. Things are definitely changing at Sony. Things are also changing for Daiichi Sankyo, one of Japan’s largest pharmaceutical groups. In a Financial Times interview, CEO Takashi Shoda talks about how a growing influence of western practices and the broader need for greater openness in order to innovate impacts his company. “The era of trying to do everything in-house is gone,” he says. “Innovation means open innovation: partnership, networking, relationship with academics. There used to be an NIH – not invented here – syndrome. If a drug project did not begin in-house, we were not interested. That is changing now. Management is constantly encouraging outsiders,” Shoda says. What is the message here? The future of innovation is open and global. Companies need to get this or they will lose out. And when even very tradition-driven, Japanese companies get it, everyone needs to pay attention. Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Pay Attention When Sony and Japan Embrace Open Innovation

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by Stefan Lindegaard This great topic was raised by Arthur Lok in a discussion in the Innovation Management group on LinkedIn. It made me wonder and reflect on my own level of curiosity, what this term means to me and how it effects innovation. I think we lose our sense of curiosity as we begin to build a power base that we feel we need to protect. We have something to lose and then we begin to focus on how to protect this rather than expand and build further on what we have. So are we just defensively minded? Such a mindset definitely make incumbents more vulnerable to new innovation brought to market by companies and entrepreneurs having nothing to loose. I think this goes for products, services and thus corporate revenues as well as the knowledge base we build as individuals. If what we know today provides a good living perhaps we are not that open to challenge this and develop new points of view. Unfortunately, this does not work in times where just standing still is the same as getting behind – at a very fast pace. It is fairly easy to point out what kills curiosity. I gave an example above and you can find others in the LinkedIn discussion . The more interesting question is what we can do to avoid killing our curiosity. I hope we can start a discussion on this here. Let me start off with one of my suggestions; Try out new technologies. It took me years to get the value of cell phone texting and I am still not that good at it. In retrospect, I see this as a sign of me getting older and losing my curiosity. This lesson taught me to be open towards new technologies and not write them off as fast as I might have done. Twitter is good example. I was initially annoyed but I stayed in there and today it gives me much value. TweetDeck is a great source of new insights – just use the search function. What do you do to stay curious? Editor’s note: Check out our Continuous Innovation group for more interesting innovation discussions Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

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Saving Curiosity from the Guillotine

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by Stefan Lindegaard Vertical integration is becoming a buzz-word in the business world. Wall Street Journal recently had a good article, Companies More Prone To Go Vertical , in which they gave many examples on how companies as diverse as PepsiCo, Oracle, Boeing, Apple, General Motors and ArcelorMittal have chosen vertical approaches.

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You Must Innovate Across Silos to Succeed

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