Editorial
Innovation has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I simply love this discipline. After numerous years working on strategy and organization I stumbled on innovation theory around 2010 when I crossed the pond and moved to the US. For reasons that I cannot fully fathom, Americans are much stronger in management thought leadership than Europeans. There I discovered the work of giants such as Clayton Christensen, Henry Chesbrough, M Tushman and Rita Gunther McGrath as well as companies such as? What if!, Ideo and Innosight.
I had the pleasure to run several innovation initiatives, ranging from open innovation to ideation or innovation portfolio. I also failed hard, and underestimated the cultural change required and the managerial support required to implement radical changes on the innovation front. Each company has a different starting point, and a different understanding of what innovation means. Some have long cycles some shorter ones. The recipe for success has to be tailored.
In this issue of This Week in Consulting, we explore how to measure the innovation maturity of your company, how to design an efficient innovation strategy, how culture and diversity are strong enablers for innovation and the key drivers to strengthen your innovation capability.
Enjoy the read. Feel free to comment. Would love to hear your views.
PS: If you disagree with the above position on Europe vs NA when it comes to thought leadership feel free to prove me wrong in the comments
Laurent THOMAS
Chairman Consulting Quest
This week’s must read
In This Week’s Must Read, we explore topics such as innovation maturity, efficient innovation strategy, culture and diversity as enablers for innovation and strengthening of innovation capability.
Amid all the excitement around innovation, companies often overlook their ‘ability to innovate’ as a key competency for organizational innovation. Hence, an organization’s innovation strategy should be based on the organization’s ‘ability to innovate’ and should have a framework for the ‘ability to assess enterprise innovation maturity. These assessments will help the organization to determine the magnitude of dividends resulting from organizational innovations. This research paper from TCS highlights the key aspects to measure the effectiveness of innovation strategies along with key areas covering innovation metrics.
This week’s media
This video features professor Linus Dahlander, an expert of strategy at ESMT Berlin speaking about the evolution of the R&D sector. Innovation is no longer a single man’s job, knowledge is incredibly distributed, and today’s multi-disciplinary, global and collaborative requires the work of an entire team to bring innovation from the laboratory to the market. In this video, Linus explains how all of these paved the way for open innovation and explores the challenges and opportunities it presents.
Thought Leadership
Companies trying to strengthen their innovation capabilities frequently take steps to establish budgets, build teams or take other logical steps toward an enterprise system approach. Still, many of these initiatives fail. This paper discusses the innovation performance model, which can be used to map an organization’s current approach to innovation, assess what’s working well and identify areas for improvement.
Brands that continue to innovate even during challenging times are likely to grow significantly faster than their competition. However, any innovation initiative may go awry if your innovation strategy fails to take the context and human psychology into consideration. This paper shows the ways to drive successful innovation, by understanding consumer choices and the context in which products are used.
An innovation strategy allows organizations to systematically identify unmet customer needs in a given market and select which of them to target for growth. A good innovation strategy comes with a lot of benefits, allowing businesses to grow market share or profits by bringing innovative products and services to the market. This insightful piece discusses various steps to building an innovation strategy and the questions it should answer. Besides it also looks at the benefits of getting your innovation strategy right.
There are many innovation activities a company could employ to innovate. However, most companies don’t have the capabilities or skills to execute all of these activities. This article explores the activities involved in a successful innovation process, starting from team selection to drawing up your go-to-market strategy
This week’s consulting news selection
Deloitte Australia is all set to ramp up its modern work services offerings along with the team from leading workplace learning consultancy, The ID Crowd, a specialist in digital learning solutions|
Carla Matthews, an expert in complex cross-border, multi-jurisdictional high stakes disputes, has joined PwC UK’s restructuring practice as Head of Contentious Insolvency and Asset Recovery. Carla’s role includes working closely with PwC’s Forensics and wider Deals practice, reinforcing the strong existing relationships in these complementary areas. |
The consulting, transformation, and digital services firm, Capita partnered with WithYouWithMe to launch an initiative called ‘15,000 Futures’. It will support former members of the UK armed forces and their partners to find employment in the technology and digital sectors after leaving the military.|
Leanne Tanner an expert in assessing and quantifying damages, and disputes relating to competition, financial services, telecommunications, construction and insurance, has joined HKA in Australia as a Director in the Forensic Accounting and Commercial Damages practice. |
Laurent is the Chairman and Co-founder of Consulting Quest. Focused on greater value creation, and being thoroughly familiar with Consulting, Laurent has sourced and sold millions of dollars worth of Consulting over the course of his career. Prior to joining Consulting Quest, Laurent was Executive Vice President Oil and Gas at Solvay and Senior Partner Transformation at Oliver Wyman.
