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 Intranet & Portals Conference | Amsterdam

After arriving to a very cloudy Amsterdam on the Wednesday afternoon, we were excited to see what the city had to offer. Canals, cyclists, coffee shops were surrounding us when we were walking the busy streets of Amsterdam. I almost got run over by a cyclist – luckily I survived thanks to Francisco that had his eyes on every cyclist in town.

Indeed we live in an era of social networking! We had a few drinks in a busy pub close to the popular Dam square where we suddenly started chatting with Ricardo, a Brazilian/Canadian engineer and patent holder. Many great ideas and stories were discussed over a couple of Heinekens and we are excited to meet Ricardo again, very soon in sunny Portugal this time.

Thursday and Friday – time for the event! The two days brought interesting perspectives on how social media presents a radical shift for organizations. It is important to see social networking as a journey and understanding that the cultural change will not happen over a night. In fact, it is crucial to be flexible and to be prepared for working with different generations as well as getting ready for the realities of participation. We will always have creators, contributors, browsers and couch potato’s within our network. But we must say – it is not all about engaging and studying employees – we must think beyond that. As we are coming from pure innovation we feel that we also have to 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. So – it is not only about adding tools and technology to your Intranet – we feel that the key to successful and engaging Intranet is to implement a technology that provides a solid ground for the true added-value – an embedded domain expertise that adds a business dimension to the technology.

Intranet & Portals 2010 was a great forum that brought together different industries and leading companies. We loved this year’s presentations from; BT, Mars, Allianz, Nokia and KPN among others – thank you for inspiring us! We are all sitting in the same boat – why not share ideas and help each other out over a cup of tea in Amsterdam. Let’s stay connected and see you all soon!

Inogate @ Breakthrough Innovation 17 & 18 March 2010

Inogate was proud to be part of Breakthrough Innovation 17 & 18 March 2010 this year which was based in the beautiful city of Barcelona!

At this event we heard from people such as Karen Morris from Chartis Insurance who gave a very thought provoking presentation on business innovation and organizational design. Karen held great importance with ensuring your organization is designed well in order to innovate which not only involves ceaseless activity but also understanding how to manage innovation failures within your organization.

We also heard from Dr. Stephen King from Nestle who spoke about implementing innovation through effective change management strategies. Dr. King was able to demonstrate how Nestle done this through a 7 step change process strategy which I’m sure was very useful and inspiring to all of the audience.

One of the steps that Dr. King mentioned was to attend International Conferences such as Breakthrough Innovation in order to benchmark and create opportunities which Inogate whole heartedly agrees with!

There were so many excellent presentations during this event however one comment that has struck a cord with us at Inogate is that there are two components for real innovation. An external network outside your company to attract idea’s and employees and an internal network to help employees communicate those idea’s effectively to create real innovation.

During this event there was an easy relaxed atmosphere where everyone had the same goal; to learn, network and innovate!

Inogate @ FEI2010 – The Front End of Innovation, Europe

Inogate participated at the Front End of Innovation Europe on 8-10 February 2010, an event that took place in Amsterdam.

The main theme of this event was to take an in-depth look at the critical factors for Balancing Short-term Profitability with Long-term Sustainability.

We heard innovative  and exciting case studies from the inventors of MP3 at the Franhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology and the invention of the Powered Toothbrush at Bruan/Oral B which really puts into perspective the process of the “eureka” moment to the actual process of innovation and taking your products to market.

Other tracks within the event were avoiding commoditization, fostering organic growth, meeting consumer demands and performing creative execution: Doing more with less, which I think we can all identify with!

This event truly helps to bring together people to share their experiences, successes and even failures. Inogate will be attending Front End of Innovation US, Boston on 3-5^th May 2010. Let’s see what’s going on over the “big pond”!