By Eloise Young, Ph.D., Senior Program Manager, NineSigma
Innovation contests, and their bigger counterparts, grand challenges, have become increasingly popular over the past few years. This is because they offer a way to find solutions from a global community while simultaneously positioning the sponsor as a player in the field and reinforcing the sponsor’s brand.
Guest Contributor: John Bacon, CEO, iP2Biz
I’m a lucky guy! I have worked for very large high-tech manufacturing companies, led software company public offerings both in the U.S and in Europe, and co-founded my own company. Plus, I am faculty for the National Science Foundation’s I-Corp program.
Some of you may know I-Corps as the result of an audacious initiative between your federal government and Steve Blank, serial-entrepreneur turned academic, and the thinker who launched the Lean Startup movement. Continue reading
By Jim Euchner, RTM Editor-in-Chief and VP, Global Innovation, Goodyear
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
—Steve Jobs
Successful growth companies are powered by effective innovation engines. Each of these has its own logic and its own sources of competitive advantage. P&G, for example, is well known for its Connect + Develop open innovation program. What makes the innovation model successful for P&G, however, is not just open innovation, but its fit with the overall profit engine of the corporation. Continue reading
By Tamara Carleton, CEO and Founder, Innovation Leadership Board, LLC; William Cockayne, CEO and Founder, Lead|X; and, Yuriko Sawatani, Professor, Center for Leadership Strategy, Waseda University
Whether it’s open innovation, portfolio management, or customer-centered innovation, implementing any new innovation framework often means changing an organization’s culture. This special issue focuses on the underlying issues that frequently lead good initiatives to stumble: How do you change culture to support change?
By RTM guest editors Irene J. Petrick, Thierry Rayna, and Ludmila Striukova
The pursuit of intellectual property (IP) that can be protected through patents, copyrights, and trademarks has traditionally formed the cornerstone of many companies’ strategies. The general rule of thumb is that IP, when it is well managed, yields sustainable competitive advantage. Recently, however, patent trolls—companies or individuals that buy up patents in bulk—have used as a weapon the very IP that was supposed to protect companies’ core inventions and provide competitive advantage. Wielding their IP ownership, these trolls have blocked its application in new innovations.
By Jim Euchner, Editor-in-Chief, RTM
Constraints are funny things. They can box you in, or they can inspire you.
A Shakespearean sonnet is constrained by the dimensions of its form: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, clear rhyme scheme, closing couplet. Yet it has consistently led to beautiful poetry. Has the form contributed to the beauty, or would it have emerged just as beautifully from blank verse?
By Jim Euchner, Editor-in-Chief, Research-Technology Management
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
– Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of DEC
By Jim Euchner, Editor-in-Chief, Research-Technology Management Journal
“The medium is the message.”
– Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan theorized that every new technology (or medium) carries with it an implicit meaning, a set of implications that go beyond its direct, utilitarian purpose. The meaning of the technology plays out over time and shifts the ways that we think about and interact with the world. Thus, technology not only fills needs in today’s world, but also sows the seeds of new needs and desires.
By Jim Euchner, VP of Global Innovation at Goodyear and Editor-in-Chief of Research-Technology Management (RTM)
Everyone files out of the meeting room. The senior R&D leadership team has just reviewed the plan for the coming year, the budget to support it, and the results of the employee engagement survey. A few questions, invariably respectful, follow the prepared presentations. As the staff leaves, there are scattered quiet discussions about the survey, which reinforced everyone’s sense that employees are strongly engaged with their work, but which also surfaced an inexplicable (to the leadership) lack of trust for the leaders.
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
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