Thanks to Innov8rs for hosting the October online Learning Lab. There were many great sessions & discussions covering the key topics of Strategy, Leadership, Portfolio Management & Governance. It’s great to see the evolution of the best practices and understanding of the innovation community as a whole. Topics that were new insights and concepts ten years ago now have multiple experts and practitioners discussing and refining them.
The high-profile court battle between Epic Games and Apple over Apple’s AppStore policies and their share of developer revenues is a prime example of the difficult balancing act a Platform operator must perform to maintain the support and loyalty of the ecosystem that their Platform depends on and their ability to control and monetize the Platform.
Corporations are increasingly prioritizing and investing in innovation as the pace of competition continues to accelerate, but for many, the question of how to effectively measure and manage their innovation efforts is the proverbial elephant in the room that no one really wants to talk about.
The artifacts of innovation are the tangible deliverables that can be managed, measured and evaluated along the innovation lifecycle. What are they and how do they help facilitate innovation?
Mature companies are rightly focused on increasing their innovative capabilities to remain competitive and drive growth, and many of them look to the fruitful results of the venture-backed startup community as a role model for innovation practices. However, there are significant differences between innovation and growth in established enterprises vs. true, venture-backed startups and ignoring those differences can be a recipe for failure.
Another great session with the Stevens Institute Symposium. This session focused on corporate venturing and open innovation with sessions lead by Hila Lifshitz of NYU, Josh Lerner of Harvard, and Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley.
New Business Incubators, Innovation Labs, or Innovation Programs within mature companies have a pretty high failure rate and are often limited to a 3-4 year lifespan. There are many potential failure mechanisms that drive this outcome, not just one or two, so all the key elements listed below are required to be successful.
This is a question that was put to us recently online. It’s a big topic and more detailed answers will depend a lot on your specific circumstances, but we’ll try to touch on some themes that should be broadly applicable.
An important, but often overlooked, aspect of managing innovation efforts is how success and failure are defined and how they are recognized and rewarded.
