IESG Instituto Europeo de Sostenibilidad en Gestión’s Post

💡 Innovation: A natural trait or can it be acquired? When we talk about innovation, we often think of creative geniuses like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Thomas Edison. They seem to have been born with an innate ability to think outside the box and create something new and revolutionary. But is innovation really a natural trait? Or can it be developed over time? The truth is that while some people may have a natural predisposition for innovation, all of us have the potential to become more innovative. The key lies in developing certain skills and adopting a mindset geared towards creativity and experimentation. Innovation: Natural or Acquired? 🤔 It's common to think that innovators are people who were born with a special ability to see the world differently. However, studies suggest that innovation is not exclusive to a select group of individuals. Innovation can be cultivated and developed just like any other skill. While some may have a natural inclination towards creativity, everyone can learn to be more innovative through practice and experience. Innovation largely depends on how we perceive and approach problems. Those who adopt a curious mindset and are open to new ideas tend to be more innovative. Additionally, the environment and experiences also play a crucial role. Companies that encourage experimentation, collaboration, and continuous learning create favorable conditions for their employees to become more innovative. Tips to develop your innovation skills 💡 If you want to cultivate your ability to innovate, here are some practical tips: ➡ Cultivate Curiosity: Always ask questions and explore new areas. Curiosity leads to seeing opportunities where others see problems. ➡ Practice Observation: Pay attention to details and trends. Observing the world around you can spark great ideas. ➡ Embrace Experimentation: Innovation thrives on trial and error. Be open to failing and learning from your mistakes. ➡ Collaborate with Diversity: Working with people from different backgrounds brings fresh perspectives and creative solutions. ➡ Foster Critical Thinking: Innovation is about having effective ideas. Use critical thinking to refine and improve your ideas. ➡ Stay Updated: Keep up with the latest trends and technologies to spot opportunities for innovation. Innovation may not be an innate gift, but it is definitely a skill that can be acquired and refined over time. By cultivating curiosity, practicing observation, adopting experimentation, collaborating with diversity, fostering critical thinking, and staying updated, you can develop your innovative potential and apply these skills in your personal and professional life. Remember: innovation is within everyone's reach. With the right mindset and proper practices, you can become a change agent and make a difference in the world. #Innovation #Creativity #CriticalThinking #OpenInnovation #GrowthMindset #FutureSkills #Curiosity #Diversity #Collaboration

Business Model Innovation Game Changers and Contemporary Issues In the contemporary business landscape, the imperative for innovative approaches to business model innovation (BMI) is more pronounced than ever, especially given the pressing grand challenges, technological disruptions, digital transformation, and pressing environmental and social concerns of our era. The prevailing discourse in business model and BMI scholarship predominantly revolves around established frameworks and methodologies, thereby not fully capturing the burgeoning opportunities and transformative forces redefining BMI's future trajectory. This open access volume aims to fill the gap in scholarly discourse by offering a theory-rich exploration into the innovative pathways of business model innovation. Crafted for a global readership, this text serves as an invaluable resource for academic institutions, their faculty, students, and practitioners of business development within both expansive corporations and medium-sized enterprises. A key contribution of this edited book is the introduction of groundbreaking models and theoretical insights within the BMI domain, identifying key research gaps and further research venues for junior and senior academics to pursue, while enhancing the comprehension of how entities—ranging from individual organizations to expansive networks—can innovate, execute, and capitalize on BMI in the forthcoming landscape. Furthermore, this book elucidates the multifaceted nature of business model innovation across diverse contexts, illustrating the myriad ways BMI can be conceptualized and operationalized to achieve varying objectives, benefits, and results contingent upon the specific scenario. Lastly, this volume is dedicated to invigorating and equipping both nascent startups and entrenched firms to seize emergent BMI opportunities, fostering an environment where leveraging networks and platforms becomes a cornerstone for future business model innovation. https://lnkd.in/dC7-ZmHj

While innovation is a critical factor in determining growth trajectory, according to the UK Innovation Survey, only 38% of organisations make idea generation a priority. The process of developing, incubating, and implementing new ideas can be daunting. What’s more, this is not a problem affecting small businesses alone. Large and public-sector organisations equally encounter wide-ranging challenges during their innovation journey. So, what can organisations do to overcome these challenges and make lasting change? Read our blog to find out!⬇️ https://bit.ly/3FJdOtO #innovation #publicsector #innovationchallenge

One of the problems with current discussion about innovation is that often people, including many experts, mistake the "increased activity" as a measure of success or achievement. This goes beyond finding the correct set of quantifiable measures or the difference between inputs, outputs and outcomes. By its very nature, innovation is about 1. trying new things or experimentation 2. deploying solutions or adoption 3. moving on to a new problem area or repeating the process It is the last step, the iterative/ ever-evolving nature of the innovation, that is hard to capture. When we talk about public investment, most governments are happy with measures like - i) startups ii) hi-tech jobs iii) patents iv) publications But these don't measure "real success". If the objective is to say increase the labor productivity without reducing the employment, may be other measures like "breadth of innovation" provide better insights. For example, which economy or innovation ecosystem (to use the buzzword) is better: A) 100 startups/ jobs/ patents/ publications, each of them targeting the same sector B) 100 startups/ jobs/ patents/ publications, with 10 each targeting 10 different sectors We seem to be living in times, where markets and investors are into the business of picking winners and pouring money into the winning company. The governments should not be doing the same. The public investment should not be about "subsidizing the risk", but instead about filling the market gaps including lack of innovation in ignored sectors.

🚀 The best part of working in innovation? Constantly having to update your skills, too! 🏃♂️ One way: 📕 I recently finished “NOW and NEW”, the new book by Frank Mattes. ❤️ I love how it cuts through the noise of all that goes wrong in #corporateinnovation. Instead, it focuses on the core problem with the current generation of our craft. 🙅♂️ The essential issue that it identifies is the incompatibility between company cores (”NOW”) and freshly-created businesses (”NEW”). 💡 I took away 2 conclusions from combining what I read with my own experience: 1️⃣ The current generation of innovation practice IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH YET. IT DOES NOT CONSISTENTLY PRODUCE RESULTS. We need to iterate to a new one, with a complete re-frame, fresh assumptions, and new approaches. What’s the evidence? Innovation teams are frankly dispensable. Companies have been cutting innovation teams left and right, despite all the changes happening in the world. Nobody would cut their Finance or HR team, even though they also don’t produce immediate profits. But innovation teams? Yes. “NOW and NEW” mentions several of these teams, and you and I know more. It also explains a basic problem that contributes to this dispensability. 2️⃣ Corporations still MUST innovate and must do their OWN innovation work, not just outsource it to startups and venture studios. It’s ESSENTIAL that we create this next—and fundamentally new—generation of innovation practice that works, and that we give companies compelling, #credible reasons to adopt it. What’s the evidence? Creating new, separate growth businesses is fine and good. But if we don’t update the company core, too, it will become ever more outdated and eventually will not be competitive anymore. This would cause major shareholder value (and job) destruction. “NOW and NEW” offers practical ways to act on this reshaping of the core, starting by improving the very way we classify innovation types. It introduces Playing Fields, especially “Playing Field 2”, where that reshaping of the core business focuses. 🤷♂️ Debate me if you disagree. These findings seem starkly obvious to me, but your experience differs. You may see something else. 💭 Looking forward to continuing the conversation with Frank, Christina A Mattes, and others about the shape that the next generation of innovation must take! 🙋 Want to contribute? Say hi! Collaborators welcome! === I post Tue, Fri (and as cool topics pop up) about credibly building businesses

I’ve read many books, but this one changed the way I think about having a strategic innovation mindset: → What if? By Randall Munroe The book was laying around during this year summer holiday. While I saw it around many times before, I thought about it as being too scientific and absurd in the same time. To satisfy my curiosity, I start reading; and I could not stop afterwards 🙂 - Do you know how many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height if Australia? -> 300 millions pigeons to be able to lift you 45 meters - Or, at what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime? -> Never, and maybe you dont want to read all of them in the end - Or, if humanity has produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? ->No, and there probably wont be enough until the year 2100 I like ridiculous questions beacuse nobody is expected to know the answer, which means it is ok to be confused. This is how Randall Munroe starts its story. This book made me reflect on how we can apply same principles while transforming the organisation and establishing a strategic innovation mindset. 1. Stay curios and keep on challenging the status-quo. One can think some ideas are absurd or impossible. Maybe, but what if it works, or one idea leads to another one? 2. Create a safe environment where individuals & teams feel comfortable to bring new ideas and try new things. People are sharing ideas with Randall that made him wrote a 2nd book, create a YouTube channel and much more. 3. Provide resources to accommodate idea generation & exploration. Each "what if?" question is addressed thoroughly and follows a systematic framework. 4. Document your findings. For each question, different scenarios are addressed and well explained. 5. Accept failure and start again. It is not about being right or wrong, but exploring an idea and see where that leads you. 6. Keep it simple and make it fun. Exploring different ideas can be overwhealming, the way Randall is aproach every question is systematic, structured, well documented and easy to understand for everyone. By answering "what if" questions in your organisation and looking beyond the horizon of what you have planned for already, it could open for new opportunities and lead to innovative ideas, new products, new ways of approaching the customers, new revenue streams, new capabilities in your teams and much more. I wrote many notes and reflections on the side on some of the stories and set a reminder to myself, to go through some of them again. Its lessons are timeless.

Although failure is sometimes necessary for innovation, failure is an experience that companies and organizations can avoid by understanding the reasons behind it. Poor ideas and poor execution can cause an innovation project failure. But what causes teams to make these mistakes in the first place? And how can companies best avoid these mistakes? By […]

Although failure is sometimes necessary for innovation, failure is an experience that companies and organizations can avoid by understanding the reasons behind it. Poor ideas and poor execution can cause an innovation project failure. But what causes teams to make these mistakes in the first place? And how can companies best avoid these mistakes? By […]

How do UK businesses innovate? The UK Innovation Survey 2023 gives us some insights into the innovation practices and outcomes of businesses in the UK. The survey covers the period from 2019 to 2021, which was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit. These events posed significant challenges and opportunities for businesses to innovate. The survey found that innovation activity dropped overall, with 36% of businesses being broader innovators, compared to 42% in the previous survey. Broader innovators are businesses that introduced any new or significantly improved product, process, organisational method, or marketing method. The main reasons for innovating were to improve the quality of goods or services, increase the range of goods or services, and reduce environmental impacts or improve health and safety. However, not all businesses could innovate successfully. The most common barriers to innovation were the availability of finance, cost factors, and uncertainty about future demand. Some businesses also reported difficulties due to COVID-19, such as reduced sales, disrupted supply chains, or staff absences. The survey also explored how businesses co-operated, obtained information, and used technologies for innovation. It showed that businesses relied more on internal sources and digital technologies than on external partners or public support. The most important source of information for innovation was within the business or enterprise group, and the most used technologies were accountancy software and cloud based computing. Businesses that had access to science or engineering skills, either internally or externally, were more likely to be broader innovators. The UK Innovation Survey 2023 provides a valuable picture of the innovation landscape in the UK, showing the strengths and weaknesses of businesses in innovating. The survey results can help policy makers, researchers, and businesses to understand the current state and future potential of innovation in the UK. Read the report here:

"Innovation, by definition, entails new and non-obvious solutions to a problem, as well as meeting customer needs that previously were not even recognized. So, it stands to reason that many of the most significant and valuable innovations will come from combining very different perspectives and expertise. That is a major reason why external innovation from collaboration with other companies proves so effective. Moreover, our research suggests that going further, and actively engaging in collaboration with companies in other industries, has the potential to amplify that effect." More on innovation in this article "Unlearning to Innovate" from the Ivey Business Journal which explores how organizations can boost their innovation capabilities by shedding outdated knowledge and assumptions. #innovation #learning