Company develops mobility solutions based on intelligent transport system

Coimbra, Portugal, May 13, 2011 – Critical SGPS announced today an agreement with Inogate to sell its stake in Critical Move, the company dedicated to the development of the innovative “horizontal” elevator transport system. As part of the deal Critical Move will re-brand as Move Mile.

“After a successful proof of concept and with two Move vehicles already in operation at the company first customer -  hospital Rovisco Pais, in Tocha – it is the right time for Critical SGPS to open the door for a new step of development in the company” highlights Diamantino Costa, Critical SGPS’s Managing Partner.

“With an accomplished seed capital stage for the Move project, it is time to hand over to new investors” adds Diamantino Costa, adding that this operation comes at a time where Critical Group is bootstrapping the Critical Ventures I fund – an operation that will invest seed capital in IT ventures up to an amount of €6 million.

“At Inogate our focus is to exploit disruptive business models. Move brings a game changing product for a new market – a combination that allows Inogate to full apply our expertise. Leveraging on Critical’s seed phase investment, we’ll now add to the growth and expansion of this project”, adds Paulo Janeiro, Inogate’s CEO.

For more information, please visit: www.movemile.com

Karen Shotliff, Account Manager for Inogate and part of the Organising Committee presenting at PDMA España

On the 20th January 2011, I had the pleasure of being part of PDMA España’s very first event held in Madrid at the Tryp Cibeles Hotel.

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the global advocate for product development and management professionals and the mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organisations in product development and management.

I first became involved in PDMA through Inogate where we sponsored events and was surprised that there had been no real network established in Spain where I am based. With the support of Christina Brodie (VP International Affiliates, Paolo Zanenga (Southern Europe Affiliate) and Gert Staal (Netherlands Affiliate) we then began to contact existing members based in Spain to start moving towards organising PDMA España’s first meeting.

Everyone was very enthusiastic and ready to help with the organisation which helped to the success of the first meeting of PDMA España and establishing itself in Spain.

This event proved to be an excellent platform to create a respected network of professionals, academics and service providers interested in promoting product development and management as a top priority in Spain. The next meeting and programme of PDMA España is already in development so I will keep you all updated! http://linkd.in/hH0Udx

Karen Shotliff, Account Manager – Inogate

Just a short flight to contend with and we arrived in Barcelona to take part in Axiom Groupe’s Innovation Excellence event. This will be the 2nd time we have participated so we were looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and hopefully some new ones too.

The event kicked off with Herman Wories of DSM talking about their plans for the future and what the fundamentals are for increasing sales in DSM. They have a vision to see a 20% sales growth by 2020 by innovating for growth not for the portfolio. It is clear to see that in such a huge company they favour structure and processes but interestingly which some organisations don’t do enough is that it’s not just R&D where innovation is happening but within their other business units too therefore utilising all the resources they have which ultimately speeds up their growth. Herman also touched upon creating the right culture and encouraging employee engagement as one of the most difficult areas to improve upon.

So it seemed that the theme was set for the day! Michael Hess from Siemens who spoke about Innovation in an Enterprise 2.0 also discussed how important it is to have the right culture in the organisation especially when it comes to using Web 2.0 tools to improve innovation speed. It’s tough to encourage everyone to use these tools so we agree that it must be done in a pilot phase, step by step with a nucleus of people who are truly committed to using these tools to improve the innovation process. Once you have the success here this is where you get the commitment Top-Down. Which is the most difficult bottom-up or top-down change? This is a debate that continued throughout the event long into the night!

Thankfully it wasn’t all work! The Ajuntament de Barcelona had invited us to a cocktail reception at the Palau Centelles where we would hear Jordi William Carnes the Deputy Mayor for Treasury and Economic Promotion speak about the changes and innovation opportunities in Barcelona. Unfortunately Sr. Jordi was running a bit late as he was stuck in a meeting with the Mayor but the Cava helped placate us all. Later we all went out to discover the great cuisine of Barcelona with Felix Previdoli of Lonza, Dave Roberts of Pepsico and Michel Pozas Lucic of Air France KLM to name just a few. Great night had by all!

With the recurring theme of making the most of people in your organisation and improving engagement among employees we would say this is one of the biggest challenges organisations are facing at the moment. Companies have to be global but also local coupled with the growth opportunities in Asia and Brazil is a monumental challenge to contend with. Creating the right culture locally and providing the right platforms to collaborate will create a global culture of innovation but remember don’t run before you can walk!

We have been noticing there are lots of discussions online about what an idea management solution should provide. This is helpful advice for when someone is looking for a solution but weWant2 to hear from you!

Why do you need a tool to manage your ideas? What is your motivation? Your individual and organisational objectives?

We believe in our solution weWant2 but weWant2 hear what you think. Striving for excellence in Innovation is a collaborative effort which includes our customers so contact us for a demo and tell us what you want!

www.inogate.com

Thanks very much for the post about Inogate, much appreciated! It can be tough to design a booth that says enough about a company without being too overbearing and possibly losing the message we want to send at these events.

As for the kind comments about me, I am afraid I cannot take all the credit. Scottish people are naturally enthusiastic so I think I have to thank my ancestors for that but of course to hear people say they like the accent is like music to our ears!

FYI – We’re not so small, Forrester has named us as one of emerging European idea management software providers.

Just had to get that in there! Steve’s blog is read by millions so please check it out here:

The conference did not officially start for most people until the Monday but our Account Manager, Karen Shotliff was attending the Global Leadership Forum for PDMA Chapters and Affiliates on the Sunday.

Karen is currently developing PDMA Spain under the Southern European Chapter with Paolo Zanenga. “This was a great opportunity to hear from successful chapters like The Netherlands on how to develop quality programmes and create a long lasting network with real value for their members. It’s a long journey but thankfully there is lots of support even coming from PDMA Mexico and Latin America, hopefully we can all meet again soon.”

Luckily it was not all work, we managed to take the time to go to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure where there were many rollercoaster’s like The Hulk, Doctor Doom and Spiderman. These are not for the faint hearted but we did go on them quite a few times once we got our land legs back!

The newest part to the park was Harry Potter Land and it really was magical. The talking paintings and the Sorting Hat were amazing, and a certain person who shall remain nameless could have stayed all day.

To start off we attended a panel on a study of Top Tools for Breakthrough Innovation by Dr. Gina O’Conner, Associate Professor of the Renssealer Polytechnic Institute with Brenda Tollet, Innovation Director of Ashland Inc and Mike Hess from Medtronic. All interesting perspectives especially from Brenda Tollet regarding how companies should have a unified language of innovation and that there should be a corporate mandate to commercialize and develop breakthrough innovation by targeting the right people who are the best at what they do within the company.

Another session that was popular with most of the crowd at PDMA was Dan Pink, author of “Drive” which analyzes motivation over the perspective of science. He shared with us that over the years there have been many experiments for analyzing the importance of commissions in the solution of problems, and the conclusion was that incentives don’t really work with heuristic tasks (creative work). On our behalf it’s great to see that our vision on incentives is aligned with the latest trends!

We’d also like to point out the work IPEX has been doing in product development management, making it clear that the benefits of using an innovation process can be leveraged by others than just large enterprises.

In between the 3 days of the conference we met some interesting people like Gert Staal of PDMA Netherlands, Steve Smolinksy, Allan Anderson of Massey Engineering, Veronica of PDMA Central America and Gabriel of Continental Disc Corporation. Thanks to all these guys and many more for making this a great event.

We hope to see you all very soon!

That’s why INOGATE will be attending the following events:

This week we will be flying to Orlando, Florida to attend PDMA’s internationally renowned event, the 34th Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management. http://conference.pdma.org

Next month in November we will be attending the Business & Innovation Network @ FEUP which will be held at the FEUP Campus, located in the World Heritage City of Porto – Portugal on November 10th, 11th and 12th 2010. http://bit.ly/ctdkn9

And to kick off a great start to 2011 we will be travelling to Berlin to attend The Front End of Innovation Conference 2-4 March 2011. http://bit.ly/W8kK We hope to see you all there!

Inogate @ Forrester Report

Inogate is growing their idea management software market space worldwide. According to the latest Forrester Research report published on August 3rd 2010, Inogate has been nominated as one of the two emerging European idea management software providers.

With offices in Portugal, Spain and the newly opened office in the UK, Inogate is continuing to impress the industry and simplify the way their clients innovate by advancing their Enterprise Collaborative 2.0 solutions.

By focusing on advanced semantics, dynamic profiles and artificial intelligence capabilities, Inogate’s solutions can simply bridge clients’ organizational silos, boost creativity and promote innovation culture throughout the entire organization.

To access the mentioned report, please go to: http://bit.ly/asI4VK

The answer is simple. What you really need to see and understand is what you have in front of you – because your employees can make it happen. You just need to engage them! We believe that every human-centric business process must evolve and become an innovation process. Also, the practice must combine the speed and flexibility of unstructured creativity with the discipline of structured control to respond flexibly to changing business conditions. There should be a strong focus on people, their challenges and goals – something that evolve on a daily basis.  The practice needs to be designed for people but build for change.

Looking at the different solutions out there in the marketplace – there are extremely many tools that are mainly focusing on generic capabilities. They all have web 2.0 tools such as blogs, forums, social networks, wikis and so on – but is it really these tools that will make innovation happen? No, the key to successful innovation is to have a strong focus on specific business processes and cover a broad range of user groups and mix several Web 2.0 capabilities organized towards a specific business purpose.  The process will then empower individual users and transform groups and departments into highly efficient entities capable of constantly optimizing their performance trough innovation. And the rest comes by it self, simple! No more worries! Innovation will be stimulated and promoted everywhere and you will continuingly and efficiently bring great ideas into life and market.