Innovation

Innovations should be differentiated from inventions. Innovations use ideas to generate cash while inventions use cash to generate ideas.

Managing innovation
Innovation is key for companies. It allows them to pursue new businesses and stay alive. Yet, not all companies know how to manage innovation.

Morten T.Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw offer a framework to better understand the innovation process.

Innovation as a value chain is compromised of 3 phases: Idea generation, Idea conversion and Idea diffusion.

Identify your weakest link
For each item, you should try to find objective criteria to evaluate them. You can count the number of ideas generated, the percentage of funding, time to market, etc.

How to reinforce your weakest links
Your capacity to innovate can only be as good as your weakest link. Once you have identified your bottleneck, this table below explains some strategy to improve them

Ambidextrous organization
Ambidextrous organization refers to an organization structure able to both exploring the future and exploiting the present. This is a complex balance that allows the company to perdure.

H1-H2-H3 organization
Challenges,

Issues to address
Ambidextrous organizations tackle the issues of leadership, Strategic development, Ressources, and Tracking and Monitoring. Each decision has trade-offs and companies should be careful when deciding.