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In his book Managing Open Innovation in SMEs, (Cambridge University Press, June 2017), Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke considers bike-part manufacturer Curana’s success and highlights how small companies are embracing the global trend toward Open Innovation through collaborating with external partners to create breakthrough products and services.
Heineken has been experimenting with different models for facilitating ideation with external partners, culminating in the launch of its Innovators Brewhouse 2.0, which aims to balance creativity with finding solutions to real world needs.
“Stretch” is the mechanism by which established capital equipment continues to improve in terms of process and product technology and make higher output and new products long after they are built.
In the Agile approach a team works together in a scrum sharing tasks in an informal way to deliver a defined output in a relatively short time a sprint.
Lockheed Martin have used a new two-stage approach to solicit and evaluate thousands of ideas from their employees, improving on traditional financial methods used to evaluate innovation.
The term “Hydrogen Economy” refers to a proposed system of delivering energy using hydrogen as thermal and/or electrochemical fuel. It will become sustainable when electricity generated from renewable energy sources is stored as hydrogen. The three key elements will be: production, storage and utilization of hydrogen as an energy carrier. The challenge is how can organisations exploit its potential.
Predicting the future is something that all companies find hard, especially part of that future could involve radical change. Nonetheless, companies are constantly expected to make the right bets on their technology portfolio, identifying future innovations that will make their products and services not only competitive but winners in a global marketplace. Often, the executive dialogue required in order to make these choices stalls, principally because there is no mechanism to create a bridge between ‘commercial strategic intent’ and what might be possible technically both in the near future and the longer term. How can forward-looking companies make the right investment choices?
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