Sparks to fire up your innovation combustion This coaching session with Inna (Innovation Leader in a large Pharma corporation) and Wim (coach for Innovation Leaders) discusses considerations on how to engage with employees in other divisions. Click to start video Then, click on arrows to enlarge I hope you enjoy my new series of video clips! After 100 written blogs, I take it as a challenge to use a new medium to reflect my innovation knowledge and experience and to present a meaningful message to corporate Innovation Leaders. These weekly video clips with “sparks to fire up your innovation combustion” are being launched every Wednesday. The clips are short: 1-2…

Sparks to fire up your innovation combustion Click to start Then click on arrows to enlarge Welcome to my new series of video clips! After 100 written blogs, I take it as a challenge to use a new medium to reflect my innovation knowledge and experience and to present a meaningful message. These weekly video clips with “sparks to fire up your innovation combustion” will be launched every Wednesday. The clips will be short: 1-2 minutes, sometimes with an added bonus, original, engaging and dynamic. They will be in line with my focus on coaching global, corporate Innovation Leaders, especially in Pharma/healthcare. Looking forward to your feedback! Where to watch…

Optimizing external contacts Innovation can originate from anywhere in the corporation. In some cases internal innovators reach out to other companies for collaboration and access to skills or technologies. As a global Innovation Leader of course I encouraged this practice. In many cases, these collaborations resulted in new ways of looking at our business/customer problems and generated innovative solutions. For example: application of emerging technologies that had not yet been used in our corporation, like AI, robotics and drones. However, as the number of innovators within our corporation grew exponentially, the following often happened. An innovator in a certain geography worked with a certain external company from that same location.…

Collaborators for Innovation When commercial innovators want to address a problem, IT technologies and colleagues often come to mind first. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential solutions that can be generated in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines, like finance or manufacturing. I described in an earlier blog how to break through silo’s. Let me illustrate how business challenges can be solved by working together with manufacturing colleagues. Following are examples of innovations related to two key areas of manufacturing. Packaging Problem: a key customer, a major hospital in the Netherlands, was often under stocked / over stocked on Product X. Reason: the hospital typically ordered medicines monthly. Because of…

Power from the people Innovative ideas that address a specific business/customer problem and are innovative (not tried before) and that are pursued by a passionate innovator, have the highest likelihood to be successful and to create value. Those ideas can come from anywhere within the corporation and from outside. Crowdsourcing is “the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.” Because I strongly believe in the power of the crowd, I organized at least annually a Innovation Award competition for employees from across the corporation. They were invited to…

Three keys to successful innovation Innovative corporations encourage employees to experiment, especially those employees who have a valuable, innovative solution for a key business/customer problem. How do new-to-innovation corporations get their people to come up with the right ideas and to experiment? Traditional approaches to change management usually mean major organizational efforts: all employees are retrained and “reset”. Innovation is different. Not everyone in a corporation must innovate. But everyone with the right idea should have the opportunity to innovate. And everyone must be open and supportive for innovators. Innovation is stimulated by creating a different mindset in the corporation. It’s important to keep the way innovation is managed as…

Out of hundreds…. Innovative ideas emerge in a corporation in many ways. They can be identified through Innovation Challenges. Sometimes they are generated during innovation workshops. And sometimes they just appear ad hoc. Many of those ideas look exciting. But as Innovation Leader, you do have limited time and resources, so you must make choices. How to choose the ones you should focus on? This is how I selected innovations I wanted to support: evaluating each idea on 3 criteria: Problem focused. Does the innovation address the priority problems the corporation had identified? Innovativeness . Is the idea really innovative, i.e. has it never been done before? Value generation. Does…

Managing a portfolio of innovations Innovation Leaders have to manage multiple innovative initiatives across the corporation. How can a framework be put in place without overcomplicating the process? A case study: I decided to keep this framework as simple as possible and to organize innovations in 3 groups (and one additional group for those successful innovations that were being scaled to multiple countries or brands). The 3 groups were: Focused Ideation Criteria: an new idea that provided a potential solution for a priority business/customer problem End result: a “one-pager“, a short overview of the problem to be solved, the innovative solution and the potential value that would be created Example: the addition of a…

No! For Horizon 3 innovations, innovations far from the core business, I believe that a separate, dedicated innovation team is the most appropriate construction. “Separate” meaning operating independently from the current business teams. This team can be compiled with inside and/or outside employees to focus on disruptive innovations, without being distracted and held back by the short term priorities of typical business teams. I described an example of this in an earlier blog. For Horizon 1 and 2 innovations, it’s a bit of a different story: innovators should be as closely linked to the core business teams as possible. Here, I believe that every employee should be invited to come…