The first day began with a keynote by Prof. Deschamps in which he drilled down into the concept of "innovation leadership". Some of the interesting points that came out of that were:
* Innovation leaders do not necessarily have to be innovator themselves
* Two different styles of leadership, more creative exploratory front end leaders and execution oriented backend leaders that will get your innovation faster to the market
* Enemies of successful innovation - arrogance, complacency, greed (now the last one is quite interesting!)
He touched upon the notion of top down and bottom up styles of innovation. In his view radical innovations that change business models would have to be done top-down whereas incremental innovation is suitable for bottom-up innovation. My view is a little different. I think any type of innovation, there has to be synergy between the gathering of ideas whether they come from the leadership or from the average Joe and the leadership team that ultimately makes final decisions. So a radical, business model changing idea could come from a grass root, open ended innovation exercise in a truly bottom up manner. The difference would be in the scale and the leadership level at which it will get evaluated, selected, and implemented.
I gave my ending keynote on the second day. I mainly talked about the idea of democratizing innovation, why there is a surge in companies wanting to do this, strategies for executing this bottom-up approaches, and some observations about how companies go about doing this. The message was to move away from insular innovation to a more transparent and open model.
We heard a series of presentations, mainly by employees leading innovation in their companies in some capacity. Some described efforts that started at the top (e.g. Amanda West, Chief Innovation Officer of Thomson talked about their incubation program), some were about individuals leading the charge via specific projects and initiatives (Ron Exner from Kraft Foods talked about innovations in packaging and the process of taking those innovations from R&D to production).
Open Innovation
Companies are increasingly keen on collaborating with other companies as well as individuals outside the company. The main reason for collaboration with other companies is to take advantage of their respective core competencies to quickly bring new products to the market. P&G's collaboration with Dunkin Donuts is a good example of this where P&G combined their expertize in supermarket distribution channels with the unique brand of coffee produced by Dunkin Donuts. Coke's collaboration with illi on coffee products is another.
Collaboration with customers or individual innovators is often done to support incremental product improvements, but some time also done to create new products based on innovative ideas suggested by customers or individual innovators. Customer feedback sites like Dell's IdeaStorm are a well known example of the former. Martin Ertl from Bombardier talked about co-creating railroad technologies (e.g. improved car designs) via customer competitions which also fits within the first category. P&G's "Connect + Develop" and Shell's "Game Changer" initiative illustrated the later. Micheal Ruggier from Shell gave a good example of an innovation that results via such collaboration: a device for measuring 3-phase flows created by applying body scanning technology found in medical devices.
Internal Innovation
A number of speakers (Philips, Kraft Foods, BASF, Thomson Reuters) talked about traditional innovation processes that originate and managed in a top-down manner. Most of these were in industry segments that rely on complex technologies to create value and therefore inherently rely on subject matter experts to create and deliver innovations. Most companies have a system of evaluating emerging trends and inferring key strategic innovation areas that should become the focus for their R&D efforts. Coke, for example, identifies the "Need States" and pairs that with demographic factors to get insights into unmet market needs as well as drive product marketing.
Surprisingly there was relatively little discussion on employee-driven innovation except in two cases. Hannes Erler from Swarovski gave a very good overview of their innovation process. Swarovski creates upwards of 1300 products every year and benefits tremendously from suggestions posted on their on-line idea management system. Novartis presentation mentioned "Innovation Oscars" but did not provide much detail.
Going Green
Green technology was definitely a hot topic. Prof. Markku Wilenius talked about Kondratieff cycles as measured by 10 year yield on S&P 500. The current downturn is unique in the extent to which it is affecting the entire world. The major challenge in coming out of this economic cycle would be the balancing act between increased human demand for resource consumption and lowering ecological impact of future development. It was interesting to hear technologies developed in this direction including oil spill containment, eco-friendly cars, and electronic printing technologies.
Innovation Measurements
I heard a few interesting thoughts about measuring results of innovation process. Shell's Game Changer program converts roughly 1% of submitted ideas into working products. Dr. Martin Curley mentioned that success rate of innovation is 5% although the source of this information was not clear. Bombardier presented an interesting way of characterizing the value of socializing innovations. He provided statistics on the "value" provided by users participating in their YouRail contest. He computed that value based on the money the company would have spent to have their employees engage in a similar collaborative innovation effort. The calculation was done by mapping hours spent on the competition sites, page views, and number of designs produced by the community.
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