Exploring the right way to innovation

In today’s fast-paced market companies are constantly looking for new ways to find original ideas and concepts that will ensure market success in today’s consumption culture. In the era of social media, information overload and sleepless communication – how do you know you are doing the right thing? Choosing the right tool and cutting innovation costs? Building an innovation culture and putting the culture into practice?

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.

Inogate at the XXII ISPIM Conference | Bilbao

We arrive in Bilbao after just a short journey and have to say the countryside is beautiful. Rolling green hills and swiss-style houses that you wouldn’t expect to see in Spain however we are in Basque Country in the North where they get lots of rain.

After taking some time to explore the city we attend the cocktail reception at the Atrio del Edificio Ensanche on behalf of Bilbao Tourism and also listened to a speech from the Deputy Mayor where he thanked us all for coming and mentioned that Bilbao is at the forefront of innovation. ISPIM has been running events for years so it was so nice to see people who had kept in contact since their last meetings hugging and happy to see each other. What a friendly bunch of people!

This event is not your normal conference where only companies come to speak about their innovation strategy’s but it also welcomes Professors and University’s from around the world so we got to hear some very interesting perspectives from the world of academia.

Day 1 began with the Keynote Speakers Prof. Joe Tidd, Matt Kingdon and Jon Azua discussing lean innovation and co-creative innovative value then later after lunch many parallel sessions which really gave covered everything from Open Innovation, Business Models to Measurement & Performance and training People in Innovation. So Day 1 was packed with information. One comment from Kaheel Mailk from the University of Manchester really summed up how we think about innovation, “trust is a key component”. So true!

Later we were off to the Guggenheim Musuem for a private viewing of the collections and then a Gala dinner in the actual museum’s Atrium, we felt very lucky so to be in such a terrific building. One of the collections Anish Kapoor was terrific with wonderful sculptures and colours. (Although not being an art buff myself I’m not sure if you could call them sculptures!) Have a look at the website and let me know your thoughts on the Anish Kapoor collection. http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/index.php?idioma=es

After a good nights sleep we are back at the event where all day we have sessions running. The parallel sessions that we enjoyed a lot were Open Innovation & Collaboration and Customers. We heard from Christina Oberg in the afternoon who talked about customer roles in innovations. Christina said that innovation must be customer driven and by doing this they get free knowledge on how to improve their products. This is certainly something we have embedded in our process otherwise you never meet the needs of your customers. One such other comment was made by Beatriz Lara from BBVA, Beatriz said “customers rule” get over it!

So after another whirlwind day we are again taken out to a fabulous place for dinner. A Basque evening at the Azurmendi Restaurant and a tour round the Txakoli Wine Cellar. We were greeted at the door with glasses of Txakoli (white wine famous to that region) given a quick tour and then whisked upstairs to enjoy a lovely meal and live band. Once the drink started flowing everyone was on the dance floor for many hours and I’m sure a lot of people did not want the evening to end. We didn’t….

We would like to thank the Iain Bitran, Stephen Koen and the rest of the Board of ISPIM for such a wonderful event. They really did find a great balance between attending a conference and having fun. We loved all the interesting places in Bilbao we got to visit (we took around 200 photos!) so have a look on Inogate Facebook.

Inogate at the World Innovation Convention | Ibiza

Well what can we say, it has been a busy couple of weeks here at Inogate. Quick visit to Scotland then off to Ibiza and Amsterdam!

The weather in Scotland was exceptional (big surprise) then we arrived in Ibiza to attend the World Innovation Convention. The event took place at a retreat called Atzaro and it definitely had the WOW factor.

Inogate at WIC 2010

Not only was the location amazing but the people we met made attending The World Innovation Convention 2010 even better. We were lucky to have dinner with Stephen Attenborough from Virgin Galactic who presented on Virgin Galatic’s programme about the future of space tourism. Thanks Steven for putting up with all our questions during dinner! Amazing to think that soon we can all fly to space!

Martin Curley from Intel also joined us and during numerous taxi journeys and lunches we discovered that Susana our Business Developer at Inogate share a passion for CMMI, not all of us knew Susana was such a techie!

It was not all work however, we managed to get a small group together and went out in Ibiza town for tapas and sangria and made it back to the hotel at a reasonable hour.

This really was a great place to bring together the greatest minds from Innovation – Saatchi & Saatchi, P&G, Swarovski, McLaren Automotive and lots more. If only all the events were in such a nice location!

Check out this video of the conference:
http://www.ibiza-professionals.com/world_inovation_convention/

Next up for Inogate, we will be in Bilbao at the XXI ISPIM- Dynamics of Innovation conference, home of the famous Guggenheim Museum. More blogs and pictures to follow.

Inogate at Front End of Innovation, Boston

Inogate arrived in Boston to attend a 3 day conference with Front End of Innovation (3-5 of May 2010). This is an event we had been looking forward to for quite some time and with so many interesting presentations to hear it was difficult to choose which one first!

inogate

So how do you make sure innovation is successful? A question we all want the answer to. Clotaire Rapaille, President & CEO of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide revealed that innovation is only successful when it is on “code”.  Clotaire told us that you need to try and understand the true emotional and biological roots of our own opinions and behaviours and by doing this we can better motivate consumers, design new products and improve communication strategies. Think about it, every culture has a “code” so understand each culture and think about the solutions they want, not what you want!

Every day we all want to be successful in everything we do but what about the future? What plans do you have for your business? Vijay Govindarajan, Founding Director of Tuck’s Center for Global Leadership presented on the key principles of Business Model Innovation. The first is to have a “big dream”, something that you think is possibly out of reach and make that your goal. The next principle is to have next practices not best practices. Make your own, don’t benchmark, don’t imitate and set the bar high. The last principle is amplify weakness don’t hide it! We think that these key principles can be applied not only for the business model but for individuals too. We all need to dream bigger!

FEI US was a huge event where people from all walks of life and business came together to learn from each other and understand that collective intelligence is the key to innovation. We also heard from FEI Champions who are leading practitioners such as Joetta Gobell, Nissan North America and Terry Barhart from Pfizer. They gave us real life case studies of how to inspire innovation in your team and organization and also the power of continuous feedback.

Even after hearing all of these presentations we still found some time to get out and about to experience life in Boston. We even managed to visit Cheers unfortunately we didn’t get to meet Sam, Norm or any of the others but we managed to sample a burger named after the fabulous Carla, yum!

Great city, lovely people and we hope to see everyone again at next years FEI event

We are preparing a small video with pictures taken! Don’t miss it! We will upload it soon.