Started in early 2009, Google Ventures has seen an increasing number of successful investments over recent years. As part of the program Google Ventures launched a Start-up Lab program to create an innovation lab; a place where entrepreneurs can develop their products, collaborate and tap into google employees. Moreover, to develop in-depth knowledge, Google Ventures created the Start-up University, a place where entrepreneurs “can bring questions, curiosity and unsolved problems to the table.” This

After having succesfully launched a poll in December, we decided to drop a new question for you. 2012 has just started and many newspapers, blogs and video’s are trying to show us the trends for upcoming year. Summarizing speeches of professional trendwatchers I ran into lately, I could identify a few trends that are interesting for 2012. Epxerience economy Most of the trendwatchers are seeing trends in the way consumers are acting in the market.

Last month, we released a Poll on linkedin and dropped the question “What is the greatest advantage of Open Innovation”. Quite some people voted and a good discussion started off. The results were as following:       What is the greatest advantage of Open Innovation? The result was not completely unexpected. Obviously, on the first hand, Open Innovation is meant to innovate faster and better. To my opinion, and some

We collaborated with Marcel Bogers, Associate Professor* at the University of Southern Denmark, to show you an exclusive preview of a lecture on “Managing Open Innovation”, that will air on Danish television later this winter. The lecture is about the “sources for innovation”: how to obtain and make use of external knowledge to commercialize ideas into innovations. The talk focuses on Open Innovation and the role that companies and users play in

Recently, I spoke to Deloitte‘s Innovation Concepts Manager Marc Maes and Innovation Consultant Klaas Langeveld about their idea of managing innovation and idea generation within companies. They explained me about their Fast Track strategy and their home-made Innovation Maturity Model. The model intrigued me because of its fairly complete coverage of innovation-related issues and its slim simplicity. It triggered me to grab some literature to find prove of this model. My rationality: if it looks simple and complete,