globalization

The Emergence of Innovation in China

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Jim Euchner,  From the Editor, RTM 61.3

“Let me speak frankly: the advantage of innovation for multinational companies has shrunk substantially since the early 2000s.”

—Professor Hengyuan Zhu, Tsinghua University

 

I was invited to visit China for the first time in 1989, to speak about expert systems, then at the forefront of practical AI. At that time, technology transfer from the West to China was a one-way street, and it was expected to be so for some time. My visit was canceled by the tragic events at Tiananmen Square in June of that year. The emergence of a vibrant culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in China seemed very far away.

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The 4 Rules for Success with Global Teams

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer and Social Media Manager, IRI

Technology lets us do amazing things. Where once a research and development (R&D) team needed to be located in the same facility in order to collaborate, today, the sight of engineers collaborating with globally distributed coworkers via IT tools is quite common. But this dispersion of staff poses challenges of its own. For instance, when you have yet to meet one of your co-workers in person, how do you develop trust with her? When you share an office space it’s easy to casually pass along concerns, observations, insights, or interesting findings to your colleagues around a water cooler. Is it possible to replicate this with global teams? Not really. So communication is dampened on a global team. Based on research at the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), these challenges have been studied and some general rules about building a successful global team have been laid out. Continue reading →

How to Get More (and Better) Crowdsource Competitions Participants

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer & Social Media Manager, IRI

Let’s face it, the number of crowdsource competitions blooming into existence these days is staggering; almost too many to choose from. This is normal, of course, for any research practice that proves itself an effective method for solving problems quickly. But there’s a downside: with so many competitions to choose from, people who would normally participate in many competitions will, over time, become more selective. Why should they choose yours?

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Final #innovate2038 game roundup

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By Jason Tester, IFTF, Innovate2038 Game-Master

Amazing #Innovate2038 community:

Three words: you. all. rock! The game ended at 9pm PT / midnight ET last night, with a final tally of 9,958 ideas from 543 players representing 53 countries. And this wasn’t just about quantity—we’re totally floored by the quality of the ideas and innovations, discussions and collaborations that you co-created over the past 36 hours to make the future.

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Innovation Portfolio Management

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By Scott Mathews, Technical Fellow in the Chief Engineer’s office at Boeing Research and Technology and co–guest editor of this special issue of RTM.

It is difficult to understand why doing portfolio management well is so challenging. Shouldn’t it be as simple as deciding on a few attributes, like net present value and time to market, lining up all the opportunities and ranking them on those attributes, then funding the best of the bunch until you run out of money? If life were so simple, we would all have 2.5 children and live happily ever after. Clearly, it’s not. Continue reading →

Defining Your Supplier Relationships Matters

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By Ed Bernstein, IRI President, and Greg Holden, Business Writer

Elements of business that were traditionally taken for granted are coming to play ever greater roles in how we innovate. The horizontal growth of companies today, reflective of the rise of globalization and increased resource constraints, is eroding traditional structures. This is probably most visible in supplier relationship management (SRM), the topic of one of IRI’s newest Research-on-Research (ROR) working group projects.

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Why Innovation Economy 2020 Matters

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By Ed Bernstein, IRI President

While sitting in a meeting about innovation on Capitol Hill, I noticed that the Congressional leaders in attendance agreed that no mechanism for establishing an innovation policy existed. I was struck by the oddness of this notion considering President Obama’s own “Strategy for American Innovation” report was issued back in 2011 and included rather clear recommendations about which policies addressed this topic. But I also saw this as an opportunity to expand the way these leaders thought about what represents innovation policy.

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The enlightened organization

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By Ed Bernstein, IRI President, and Greg Holden, Business Writer

In general, the seventeenth and eighteenth century period known as the Enlightenment is considered a time when a new methodology was being imposed onto governments and accepted by societies across Europe and the “New World.” The parts making up this methodology included the use of reason, skepticism, and the scientific method in order to challenge long-established practices stemming from traditions, superstitions and religions that stretched back into antiquity. However, enlightenment itself is not about merely changing the way one looks at the world, as the Age of Enlightenment philosophers set out to do, it is also about destruction. Enlightenment is the dismantling and discarding of old, deep-seated beliefs in exchange for new ideas which are better supported by the available evidence.

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