The factors that bring people together into a collaborative venture are varied. One is proximity and shared goals: people within a department, for example, have more opportunities to work together than people across different departments. Another factor is similarity: people who are similar to each other, either because they have the same or similar age, […]
Subject: Creativity and Innovation
Balancing Incentives, Risk and Tolerance of Failure for Collaborative Innovation
Innovation through collaborative teams can succeed or fail in large part based on resources dedicated to the venture. While many factors may ultimately impact success or failure, all else being equal, if more resources are allocated to a project, the risk that it fails is less. Whether or not managers are willing to dedicate those […]
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When Suspending Group Debate Enables Innovation
How can new product development (NPD) teams best generate ideas and develop them into viable concepts? The ‘obvious’ answer — through interaction and working together — is not necessarily the right or best one. While some studies suggest group debate and group brainstorming offer significant benefits — for example, the ability to combine and integrate […]
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How Well Is CSR Embedded in Business Strategy?
Corporate social responsibility and sustainable development are increasingly linked to competitive advantage and innovation. Harvard’s Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer have, in recent years, ‘reframed’ CSR as ‘shared value’, pointing to the business opportunities in ‘unmet social needs’. Meanwhile, the external pressures for responsible business — from governments and regulators and from shareholders […]
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Why Inferior Innovations Often Beat the Best
New products and technologies often fail to depose inferior ‘incumbents’. (The classic example is the Dvorak keyboard, which, despite being more efficient, lost out to the original QWERTY model in the 1930s.) New products and technologies of equal strengths often go on to win unequal shares of the market. The dynamics of competition are complex. […]
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Managing Cross-industry Innovation
How do you combine previously unconnected technologies in an entirely new product ‘architecture’? This is a particularly important question when the development project involves collaboration with other industries and companies — and between specialists who have different ways of doing things and haven’t worked together before. Recent research addresses it by analyzing and comparing three […]
Great Innovation! But What’s it for? Marketers Beware
In a classic episode from the old American TV show The Odd Couple, the main character Felix replaces all of the traditional furniture in his apartment with new furniture featuring radical designs (e.g. the chairs are in the shape of huge hands). While his roommate Oscar figures out how to use the ‘hands’, he’s astonished […]
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Generalist CEOs Not Specialists Spur Innovation
Generalist CEOs are CEOs who have worked in different organizational areas, for a number of different firms, in different industries, or even in a conglomerate firm. Former IBM CEO and Chairman Louis Gerstner is a typical example. Before joining IBM, he had been a consultant at McKinsey & Company, had held senior positions at American […]
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Co-creating with Customers: More Pros than Cons?
Co-creation in the business-to-consumer (B2C) environment is nothing new. Many services — ranging from hairdressing to care for the elderly through architecture and interior design — have long involved close collaboration with customers and clients and long been ‘marketed’ partly through word of mouth. It has, however, been given new impetus — and a higher […]
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Innovation Partnerships-Loosely or Tightly Coupled?
Increased emphasis on continual innovation — and increased awareness that it demands knowledge beyond the confines of a single organization — means research partnerships have become a more common and more important strategic tool. These inter-organizational arrangements fall broadly into two camps: the tightly coupled partnership; the more loosely coupled alternative. The former is characterized […]
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