Live from FEI EMEA: Implementing Sustainability in the Design Innovation Process

In the first part of the presentation Elli Verhulst, Researcher and Lecturer from Artesis University College Antwerp, described that there is really a change towards sustainability, and there is in the meantime more potential for it coming up.  But one key question is: How can sustainability be implemented in the design innovation process? The challenge there is going from theory into praxis.

Success factors and obstacles are mentioned in literature, but there has not been a lot of research on the human factor.  Therefore she was focusing her work on looking for patterns of the implementation process and how it is influenced by the human factor in an empirical study. Two patterns have been identified, a kind of bottom-up as well as a top-down approach.

The following 4 human factors were identified and outlined:

Resistance against change
First this didn’t really seem to fit, since there was always a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning, but after a while resistance occurred since people realize that they need to change their behavior though the resistance is not related to sustainability.

Communication on changes
Three types of communication were found: Communication on process support, information gathering as well as spreading and empowering people.

Empowerment and involvement
Sustainability often starts as an initiative of individuals like strong believers, based on personal belief. It usually stays small scale; to spread it in the company you need management support.

Organizational Culture
The adaption of approach for the implementation process she described as an adaption to culture and less adaption to needs of sustainability.

At the end of her presentation part Elli Verhulst proposed an implementation model with 3 main circles including 1. stage of implementation process, 2. activities related to human factors and 3. departments and employees involved (see left).

In the second part of the presentation, Eric Pass, Director and Member of the BOD, Corporate Planning and Communications at Nitto Europe NV, presented a business case.

Nitto Europe NV is part of a Japanese company with approx. 33.000 employees, 5.5 bn € annual turnover and about 13.500 products for ca. 70 industries.

Nitto Europe’s Vision for 2012 has been created in 2008:
REACH 2012 as a clean, green and healthy company, 20% turnover to be achieved by 12 Green Value products. The REACH directive in Europe was chosen to be recognized as opportunity to innovate. To realize “Cradle-to-Cradle” was the goal. For each element of the cradle-to-cradle concept concrete objectives for the company were identified.

Three examples regarding the focus of Nitto Europe’s Sustainable Development were presented.

Example 1: “Light weight” functional materials for cars
Example 2: Bio-based Adhesive Tapes that are completely biodegradable
Example 3: “End-of-Life”-functionality to deal with waste from old mobile phones to recycle assembled phones. The idea behind the last is a closed loop (re-)manufacturing, working together with Philips and others; a different business model needs still to be created.

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: Creating Shared value for Business, People and Society

Elke den Ouden, Author and Senior Consultant, working for Philips, started here presentation with an overview on Philips, which is focusing on Healthcare, Lighting and consumer lifestyle.

She described an ongoing Paradigm shift with the society moving into transformation. More and more managers and entrepreneurs try to combine making business and at the same time creating a better world.  So the context of business has changed over time.

"Good solutions create value for people, organization and society”, which is also the title of her book that has been recently published. She presented an onion model covering putting into consideration different stakeholders and different levels. Meaningful innovations would connect the different levels and add value there. There is still room left with white spots for new opportunities.

She also presented examples from her work at Philips, e.g. an Ambient Experiencehospital lab. Another example for designing an ecosystem was about Dementia; 98% of the carers of dementing persons suffer from physical and emotional problems and fatigue. The initial value proposition of Philips was in redesigning lighting solutions for institutionalized care to improve the mental state of people with dementia significantly, but the question came up, what to do prior at home to stabilize the situation there already? As a starting point to explore more opportunities in that area for Philips Elke van Ouden presented a mapping to better understand the patient journey as well the stakeholder environment.

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: Why should you consider a separate Research team?

Alfred Yoakim, Head of Nestlé System Technology Centre, addressed in his presentation the Nespresso Story. At the beginning Nestlé had a great product, but they had no clue about the coffee machines. In 1986 a new group was set up as an independent group - with freedom to innovate in the traditional areas.

The original team was working from 1986-1993, e.g. developing the Nespresso original machines and system, filling the pipeline and developing new capsule generation. The team has been replaced in 1993 until 1998, mainly focusing on quality improvement and production aspects. The original team was called back in to stimulate innovation.

In the following years several different coffee machine types have been launched. Several proposals for new launches were originally not supported by the Top Management, which were very successful after launch, several times under a new management.

The total team didn’t have even 10 members and worked as a mix from different disciplines and age. They developed more than 300 concepts and 5000 patents over time.

The common process went in a loop from Idea Generation to Prototyping further to Concept Testing, closing again the loop for new Idea Generation.  After the concept tests the step of getting Marketing & Commercial buy-in towards industrialization always needs to be passed.

Guiding principles of the team included the realization of quick wins; Innovations doesn’t necessarily mean Invention or complex technology which helps to speed up. But also putting the consumer into the center and acting with defined End-Dates, making sure to have a leadership vision and a common sense. But also beware of short term imperatives and going for renovation instead of Innovation.

In2011 the organizational change was made to transfer the team from a hidden group within Nespresso to a recognized force within Nestlé.

Alfred Yoakim closed his presentation by providing success factors based on his lessons learned:
Make sure that the team works stand-alone and protected, is empowered and funded, is free to innovate and explore and has Champions in addition to Management support.

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: 2012 Challenge, Part 2: "How do you create buy-in?"

The Grand Challenge 2012 had already been started on the conference day before. During the breaks as well as overnight several teams had prepared a booklet about their proposals to answer the question: “How do you create buy-in?”
Out of 4 preselected teams the winning team was identified in today’s follow-up session within 4 rounds, involving a jury as well as the audience for voting.

In Round # 1 the opening arguments were presented by each team one after another within 4 minutes.

Team 1 presented:
Tailor an offer by pulling the right things together to convince your audience!
The team chose the model of a bar tender to stress the need for flexibility to tailor an offer to the stakeholder group, which consists e.g. of top management, customers as well as own employees.
First there is a need to gather data to understand potential opportunities. Later to create stories and to apply emotional connection as well as to use an elevator pitch as part of a modular system becomes important.

Team 2 presented:
Relationship and emotions is the core of what we are doing!
Therefore you need to build up relationships with your customers and also e.g. with your brand, which implies e.g. emotion and honesty; 70 % of relationships are made by emotions.

Team 3 presented:
Creating a network ensures the best growth opportunity!
It helps to create awareness, to build agreement and to move into action
Only a network makes buy-in sustainable and you can use others for multiplying your own idea.

Team 4 presented:
You need the right Elevator Pitch!
Close your eyes, imagine an elevator pitch to be like an appetizer for an excellent meal.
It describes the value so that you are eager to learn more about it. Ideally it suits to get buy-in from everybody - anytime, anywhere with anyone. It helps to create awareness and learn from each other.
As a deliverable this group created a solution consisting out of 4 building blocks that can be taught easily. This tool can be used like a Swiss knife to take it with you inside of your pocket.

In Round # 2 there was 15 min open rebuttal, the audience could chose my moving around which team to support. This was followed by a judgment by the jury.

In Round # 3 the teams had the task to fulfill to present essential takeaways within 2 minutes each, followed by another judgment of the audience and the jury members.

In Round #4 there have been final closing remarks after discussing with their audience fan community presented by each team.

Up to this point of time the final result was still not clear. Finally, Team 2 “Relationship” made the race and became winner with a score of 104 points, closely followed by Team 1 with 98, Team 4 with 88 and Team 3 with 81 points. Our congratulations to all Teams, especially the winners from Team “Relationship”!!!!

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live FEI EMEA: Rethinking the Relationship Between Producers & Consumers Part 2

Recap of panel discussion:

• Jeroen Razoux Schultz, User Experience Design, TomTom
• Hari Nair, Global Director, Advanced Concept Design, Whirlpool
• Stefan List, Head of Cabin Innovation Strategy & Concepts, Cabin Innovation & Design, Airbus

- integrate well

- integrate consumer insights by making it a mindset, cultural standard -- hardest thing to change but it can only start from the point

- there is a lot of noise from insights, you must differentiate between valuable and "the rest"

- also find inarticulate needs of the consumer

- balance client needs and consumer needs - find happy medium

- design for people, design with people, design by people, co-create with consumers

-

Live from FEI EMEA: Creating Shared Value for Business, People and Society

We are in a paradigm shift. We are moving toward a transformation economy, people are looking for meaning, purpose, something bigger observes Elke den Ouden, Author of Innovation Design: Creating Value for People, Organization and Society, "the societal and economic challenges we are currently facing – such as the aging population, energy scarcity and environmental issues – are not just threats but are also great opportunities for organizations.

Innovation Design shows how organizations can contribute to the process of generating value for society by finding true solutions to these challenges. How can we capture value for ourselves in business ecosystems that care for both people and planet?"

Needless to say, the context of business has changed. Our challenge is to offer value to this new set of users. Borrowing value framework from social sciences: economic value for society, ecosystem, organization, and the user, the same is true for psychological value, sociological views, ecological value - identify these for meaningful, repeatable innovations.

• Enable transformation
• Do good
• Do well
• Enable pleasurable user-experiences

Live from FEI EMEA: Design as a Pathway to Innovating the Organization

As part of the Design Therapy: Enhancing Lives... Improving Business Track at the Front End of Innovation EMEA today, Pamela Mead, Director of User Experience at Telefónica Digital Services presented some of the challenges of her journey.

Telefonica designers grew by 18 new members last year in spite of Spain's economy and they are representative of 8 countries. They work on global 30-40+ initiatives a year.

Starting with no design culture lead to Mead being able to create the culture from Scratch. No preexisting notions to block the path to organization.

Prepare the organization, explain the value of the cultural changes needed and why, get buy in from the top down.

Where do you live within  strategy and visibility of organization?

Mandate to change is crucial within your organization - no debate.

Customer-driven innovation= understand what matters, make it real, make it happen.

Storytelling culture at Telefonica, a digital service provider, they use every medium to narrate and express their ideas. Drawing on paper is less costly and faster than any other medium at times.

Best practices for producing quality resources; hire the best people, have a mandate, change is by doing, empower, build an inclusive culture, bring different stakeholders together - have a space for them, engage, lastly, be accountable.

One of the biggest challenges is scaling and delivering. The dip down is much faster than the rate of innovation.

Live from FEI EMEA: Business Models that Separate Leading Companies from Followers

Alexander Osterwalder, Author, Expert in Business Model Innovation, asked himself the question in the past: Could there be a any shared language in order to create business models?

Everybody uses the same term business model, but once you dig deeper you realize that everybody uses a different definition. This has been demonstrated by interacting with the audience.

Therefore Alexander Osterwalder developed the Business Model Canvas as visual answer, which consists of 9 Key Building blocks, namely: Key Partners, Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relationships, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure, Revenue Streams.

Nespresso is an example, who sell coffee machines via retailers, which can only be used with their specific coffee pads later on and which they have protected with their own patents. Afterwards you can buy the pads via their own sales channels. Today they transfer their strategy to baby products and tea. While Nespresso is a very a successful company nowadays, they have almost failed in 1987 due to a wrong business model with the same product.

The elements of the business model fits all on one page, a copy has been distributed to every participant of the conference. Within 8 minutes the participants had the chance to give it a try reflecting their own situation. Two rules were given before: Write elements on post-its, never use the template directly template; don’t make listings on each post-it.

Regarding the Strategy there can be found different levels-
Level 0 – a strategy like a parcel, you don’t know what’s inside.
Level 1 - Beginners, who treat a strategy like a checklist
Level 2 - The Masters of Business Model Innovation, e.g. Nespresso, Nintendo; all elements fit together.
Level 3 - The Invincibles, e.g. Amazon, allowing also competitors  to sell books, now selling infrastructure ; Apple, who disrupted themselves to create entirely new business models.

Existing vs. new business models- you can do incremental innovation to improve the business models while at the same time still earning money. Or you can come up with a new business model- what you really need to do is experimentation instead of writing business plans and planning budgets. In the web people are asked about products that don’t even exist and they provide as potential customers immediate feedback. But in big companies usually the space doesn’t exit to do both, incremental and disruptive change

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: Humanity in Every Touchpoint of Your Brand

Jean-Marie Shields is Global Brand Director at Starbucks Coffee Company, today she spoke about bringing
Humanity in Every Touchpoint of Your Brand.

She shared with us some of the changes and case studies that happened behind the scenes at Starbucks.

Brand Evolution/Innovation

Revamp brand strategy: expression, mature and emerging markets, global and local, evolving business model

What has changed in the world that requires your brand to evolve?

A Shift from the "Me" world to the "We" world

From "brand" to "community"
Glocal
One size does not fit all anymore

Consumer's individual preferences should be embraced and their choices should be celebrated as extraordinary.

Humanity
Starbucks just needed to find it soul. First thing they did was change the logo.


Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She will be attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zurich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via Twitter and the FEI Blog. She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista. 

Live from FEI EMEA: Open Innovation 2.0

Brian Quinn, Business Development and Network Manager at Intel Labs Europe has provided an inspiring presentation on the topic of “Open Innovation 2.0”.

Open Innovation 2.0 means a very close interlink between partners, like Industry, Academia and Politics, where everybody gets breakthroughs out of the cooperation. By Open innovation 2.0 innovation moves out of the lab. From closed innovation, generated in a centralized way, open innovations is externally focused and integrates open networks.

Intel has established a huge and impressive network of different partners. Several examples for open innovation were presented.

Examples included e.g.
Exascale: The supercomputer of 2020 Strong commitment to advance leading edge of computing- 4 open innovation centers in Europe created.
Smartocean/ Ireland which is an Ocean Technologies Innovation Cluster

About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: Inform, Involve, Empower: An information Revolution for the Next Billion

Natesh B V, Director as Nokia Life explained the specific market situation for his business at the beginning of his interesting talk.


In emerging markets information and internet access will be mainly through mobile devices.
Currently approx. 3.7 bn mobile phones are used, but most of them are only basic ones without internet access, while 3.2 bn people have no mobile phone at all, which are primarily young people.
Users are very price-sensitive but supporting Health and receiving useful information is important.

Nokia’s vision is “Connecting People to what matters to them”.

So the questions for Nokia Life was:
How to create a business model and convince the management?

Natesh proposed a business approach for Nokia life to his Management to focus on impactful Services for Livelihood and Life Improvement, e.g. regarding education, health and Agricultural information.

Service examples include:
Learning English based on the local language as part of Education
Pregnancy device as part of Health
Information to farmers  

Business Management agreed but asked for a pilot. After a successful start the roll-out to other markets took place in 2010. Today Nokia Life provides service for 50 Million Users with more than 9 Mio updates daily in India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria.


About the Author:

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: Design as the Forerunner Paradigmatic Change in the World

Nicola Dallatana, Director of Regulatory Affairs, Europe at Segway asked us what if they had invented the bicycle instead of the Segway?

What do you when you have to sell something that has never existed before?  How do you sell a computer on wheels? It's not a car, it's not a bike... The technology is completely new.

Last ten years, Segway has been on The Simpsons. Justin Bieber has used one.  Even Chimps have used one. But this exposure didn't help with consumer pickup.

Commercial Application:

Instead Segway has partnered with airports, security, malls and gained traction with innovating the reach of  taxpayer's money.

Helping first responders get places cars can't.

Only 5% of users are mobility-challenged people.

The cost of new technology is an issue as made obvious from Google's powered search results so they skip dealers and go to direct sales.

Pay attention to self balancing technology - it is sure to be disruptive in the future.

Live from FEI EMEA: Organisational Breathing: embedding an innovation rhythm

In his presentation about "Organisational Breathing: embedding an innovation rhythm" David Thomas, Global Innovation Leader and Program Manager at Mars Inc. described his experience about setting up innovation routines for organizations that are naturally repeated like breathing in and out.

ORGAN.ization as a living system

His challenge at Mars Inc. was how to create a common approach for a business is very much driven by the segments. His objective is to foster innovation by working across the segments with joint solutions. In addition Mars University is used to train employees from different businesses in common methodologies and tools. Historically, there was a lot of freedom for each business with the consequence that there were no commonalities between the generated approaches- every business had its own approach.

Creativity and Discipline seems to be a contradiction. It’s a matter about processes and frameworks to be used as a guiding structure. This is the first step, but it doesn’t provide outcomes. Performance improves can be only realized through repetition. It's important to develop a collectice consciousness about

Why are we doing it? What are we doing? How are we doing it?

David Thomas emphasized that for him using story telling is a really powerful way to discuss what works and what doesn’t. He presented a chart which showed a linear dependency between the degree of collaboration and innovation. You really need to repeat to learn and improve.

He closed the session by sharing the following lessons learnt:

Commitment to a direction
Start breathing
Build capacity through the network
Leverage story telling to drive collective conscious
Encourage circulation
Recognise that it’s a tribal network.

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

Live from FEI EMEA: The Art of Innovation Management

In the first afternoon session Hein de Keyzer, CEO at CogniStreamer introduced his Platform for Innovation.

About 10 years ago the main problem of Innovation Managers was, that it was hard to overlook the big picture- a strong need to optimize the Front End of Innovation became obvious. Therefore, CogniStreamer developed a redesign of the Front End of Innovation to improve the Stage gate process, starting about 6 years ago.



The main challenges for companies and their Innovation Managers are:  

How to move from incremental to disruptive innovation?
How to create an environment and a platform that people within the company can work together?
How can we help people that they share information and drive towards results?
How can we strengthen this by the help of new tools?

The underlying base premise for the CogniStreamer approach is: Everybody is an innovator! Based on the Company’s experience People pop up that have not been defined as experts before.

It’s about tunneling and suggestion.Via the platform the information ia pushed through the workflow until getting results. Based on the profiling and the content the right people are identified to participate and being invited.

 In a metaphoric way a gardener does seeding, feeding, weeding and harvesting, this is what CogniStreamer supports within the innovation process. The Innovation Manager needs to be the gardener but he should use effective tools like the platform.

Frauke Lohr is running her own consulting business named Comsciencia, targeting customers from industry, academia as well as politics with special focus on innovation topics. She is currently attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zürich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via the FEI Blog and Twitter.

When your company embraces innovation it will become more profitable!

When your company embraces innovation it will also cut costs, your quality will improve, and it will be a safer work environment.

One Keystone Decision (like embracing innovation as a corporate mandate) can effect every other part of your organization. A commitment to Innovation can turn into all sorts of successes everywhere. That Keystone for Innovation is held up by all your other efforts, while providing stability for the corporate structure at the same time.

There’s a Yiddish proverb that says, "With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too.” I’ll take it one step further. When your company embraces innovation it will also become more profitable, you’ll cut costs, your quality will improve, and it will be a safer work environment.

In his new book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg, a business reporter for The New York Times, explains how some companies have achieved enormous success by altering people's habits. "If you can change a keystone habit, you unlock all these other patterns in an organization," Duhigg says. He provides the example of Alcoa. When Paul O'Neill took over as CEO, his No. 1 priority was transforming worker safety habits within this company, so that they would have zero injuries. By focusing on worker safety and examining how an inefficient manufacturing process is dangerous to employees, O'Neill found a way to bring the entire corporation in line. Bigger profits, better quality…all by focusing on worker safety.

The same holds true for innovation.

A company that focuses on innovation will…

· Be more profitable

· Have higher revenues

· Will implement more cost saving measures

· Will lead their marketplace with new products

· Will break out of the pack from amongst their competitors by having the foresight to exploit their market intelligence by leveraging their technological know-how.

· Will use their domain knowledge in new ways to explore unknown market needs.

Those seem like pretty good, cost justified, reasons to invest a company’s money and culture in the practice of innovation pursuits.

"No one says it’s easy. Innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, and monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires 'courageous patience'." So says Warren Gamaliel Bennis, an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies.

Harold R. McAlindon said, “The world leaders in innovation and creativity will also be world leaders in everything else.”

NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) last year conducted a study looking at how innovation efforts effect European service firms (see chart). They concluded: Innovative firms grow faster. Firms with high innovative capacity expanded substantially faster on average than non-innovative firms.

Think about it. If you encourage your team (including employees, third party stakeholders, customers…even the public) to offer their unsolicited ideas, you’re going to get a chance to quickly implement incremental innovations that can yield revenue improvements and costs savings.

• Someone on the production line will suggest: if you turn the machine this way or if you turn down that dial...the production line will operate more efficiently...saving money, providing a safer work environment.
  
• Someone on your sales team will come up with the idea, perhaps after coming back from a visit with a customer, that if we just modified one of our product offerings we could sell more products.
• Your third party stakeholders, like distributor networks, or a group of academics, could suggest a change in your approach that rapidly makes or saves money.

And once you encourage all these folks to feel comfortable (and it becomes acceptable) to submit these unsolicited ideas that lead to incremental innovation…you’ll get organizational engagement. Everyone will be collaborating and be comfortable sharing information. Then you can provide some strategic guidance. Let everyone know you’re interested in hearing how to explore unknown areas. This will yield breakthrough or radical innovation.

This latter type of innovation, breakthrough or radical, can happen for your company by exploiting your existing domain knowledge (your company know how) to take advantage of unknown market needs. Or it can enable your company to come up with new technological solutions to needs you discover from known market intelligence.

You don’t have to make your company’s mission to become more profitable. By making your mission to be more innovative you will have the collateral result of becoming more profitable. You'll tap into new cost savings, introduce new products, exploit new markets and offer a safer work environment.

Your employees, your partners and your customers will be happier with you because they’ll know you listen to what they have to say. And they'll know you reward by acknowledgement those who are the most collaborative and therefore the biggest contributors to the new-found culture of innovation.

If you're one of the biggest contributors to collaborative innovation then you're also one of the biggest contributors to higher profits.

Although it can prove challenging, it can be done. Recently my company and one of our partners put on an educational webinar pointing out at least ten ways to get everyone at your company on board with innovation. You can watch it here

And, of course, the simplest, most cost effective stop on the road to successful innovation is to deploy a backbone for all this ideation; a collaborative software tool; a social network for innovation.

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for CogniStreamer®, an innovation management system. You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60

Ron manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (Join Here) http://bit.ly/dvsYWD . He has written extensively on Idea Management (Read Here) http://bit.ly/b2ZEgU .

CogniStreamer® is an idea management software tool. It is an open innovation and collaboration platform where internal colleagues and external partner companies or knowledge centers join forces to create, develop and assess innovative ideas within strategically selected areas. The CogniStreamer® portal is an ideal collaborative platform that invites users to actively build a strong innovation portfolio. In addition it provides a powerful resource for internal and external knowledge sharing. The CogniStreamer® framework is used by industry leaders such as Atlas Copco, Bekaert, Case New Holland, Cytec, Imec, Phillip Morris, Picanol, ThyssenKrupp, Vesuvius, Vesta and many others. CogniStreamer® represents the best use of adaptive collaborative technology such to harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence. It is the best of breed social network dedicated to innovation.

Live from FEI EMEA: Open Innovation - The New Way of Working

Open Innovation - The New Way of Working presented by Dietmar Breyer, COO at HYPE covered...


• Finding new ideas using inside and outside parties


Myths:
End consumers are a valuable resource for ideation.

Lawyers are a roadblock to open initiatives.


• Choosing the right audience and type of participation

Factors: Vested interests, Quality of relationships, Model of engagement, commercial considerations.

• Extending innovation workspace by agile ideation software use
• Behavior and its impact on running ideation campaigns process will bring rewards
Build a roadmap, internal test drive, outcomes...

Have the sequence in place, measure success of objectives with a matrix, examine outcomes and repeat for sustained innovation.

More case studies here.


Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She will be attending the 6th annual Front End of Innovation EMEA in Zurich, Switzerland on February 27-29, 2012, and covering the event live via Twitter and the FEI Blog. She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.