A while ago I sat down with Machiel Wetselaar & David van Dinther to create a list of innovation methodologies for a course we’re developing. Up to now we’ve gathered 71 different methodologies for implementing innovation in your organization. We are still looking for ways to categorize them, but for now we’ve based our categorization on the maturity of the organization.

We’re pretty sure there are many more methodologies out there. Please drop a comment if you would like one or more methodologies included in this overview. The list is almost random.

Enjoy!

2015’s Innovation Management conference (ISPIM) was all about Open Innovation. In fact, it was one of the most keywords – and definitely the most specific one – used amongst all 233 papers presented during the conference. Although the articles are not completely available yet (if you’re not a member), I have used it to draw up a list of the 15 best articles presented on the conference on Open Innovation of 2015 so far. I have added elements of the abstracts here, but following the links you can download the full papers from the ISPIM website.

Update October 8, 2015: the links to the pdf’s are not working anymore. Please try to download the papers by searching for them on the SSRN or scholar.google.com.

1. Paradoxical tensions in Living Labs – Seppo Leminen
   This study focuses on three main classes of tensions that characterize open innovation in living labs: management, users, and the way of working. The suggested categorization of tensions into paradoxes is based on a theory review and an empirical analysis of 26 living labs in four countries. This paper proposes that living labs foster emergence of paradoxical tensions and act as a mechanism to reorganize paradoxical tensions.
2. Open Innovation in Phoenix Industries: Towards a Multinational Study – Marcin Baron
   The intervention is focused on the way innovation is managed in so called Phoenix Industries (clusters of small and medium-sized businesses working with broadly similar technologies that have sprung up in former industrial areas). The issue of open innovation in PIs emerge as a new research concept.
3. Do SMEs Perform Better When Using Open Innovation Methods? – Tibor Döry
   Our conclusions are pretty much in line with the growing number of publications that indicate it is worthwhile and profitable for the SMEs to use open innovation methods. This is verified by the higher turnover, exports and patenting activity of the SMEs actively involved in open innovation.
4. Profiting from Open Innovation: an Exploratory Research – Paula Anzola
   This paper aims to answer the following question: how do companies take advantage of coupled innovation practices? For this purpose, three case studies are discussed by means of applying a conceptual framework that structures the coupled innovation process in three areas of relevance: development, integration and commercialization of the innovation.
5. Sustainable open innovation and its influence on economic/sustainability innovation performance – Elke Perl-Vorbach
   Open innovation and sustainability are contested, but widely used concepts, both in business practice as well as in management science. Based on the results of a quantitative study with cross-industry sampling, this paper explores the correlation between sustainable open innovation and a company’s economic and sustainable innovation performance.
6. The Role of Organizational Culture in OI Process: Theoretical Framework – Simone Franzò
   Despite within the extant literature the role of “soft aspects” such as Organizational Culture (OC) with respect to the firms’ innovative behaviour have been deeply analysed, with empirical and quantitative studies as well, the role of OC for a successful implementation of OI have been poorly investigated. This paper aims to bring to light which are the capabilities that a firms has to possess for successfully implement all the stages of the OI process, and which is the impact of a firm’s OC in the development and implementation of such capabilities, distingiushing between the different organizational modes through which OI can be implemented.
   
   
7. Open for Business: Universities, Entrepreneurial Academics and Open Innovation – Allen Alexander
   The emergence of open innovation theory and practice, alongside the evolution to a quadruple helix system of innovation, has led to a need for universities to rethink their models of engagement with industry and wider society. One important element in this system is the entrepreneurial academics; however there is a lack of research considering the motivations of entrepreneurial academics, who differ from academic entrepreneurs, to engage in knowledge transfer in line with open innovation policy.
8. What Skills and Competences are required to Implement Open Innovation? – Daria Podmetina
   Once companies open up their innovation process, the internal structures change, the new tasks and challenges emerge, and employees are no longer expected to have technical-scientific or managerial expertise only but in addition, they should possess certain specific competences and skills. However, the description of these required capabilities often remains vague.
9. Identifying Open Innovation Capabilities: A Critical Literature Review – Colin Cheng
   The initial results of the literature review show that various capabilities are considered to be important for implementing open innovation. This insight is necessary for managers who intend to increase the openness of their innovation strategies, or who aim for increasing the effectiveness of their current open innovation activities.
10. Solving Complex Problems with Open Innovation and Collaboration – Christophe Deutsch
    Governments, Institutions, Research centers and companies are facing always more complex problems. This complexity emerges from several outside factors: rarefication of resources, environmental aspects, legal aspects, time constraints, globalization or technological complexity. These problems cannot be solved with a traditional way of thinking.
    
    
11. Knowledge Flows Management: Open Innovation + Triple/Quadruple/Quintuple/N-tuple Helix – Marcelo Amaral
    Innovation is the result of a knowledge creation/application to solve real problems. Open Innovation (OI) and Triple Helix (H3) and its variations (quadruple, quintuple, n-tuple) are models to deal with knowledge flows that enable innovation management in a knowledge based economy. These models allows us to analyze player’ behavior and propose strategies (to firms) and policies (to government and academy) to promote innovation and consequent economic development. Together, TH+OI can be understood as a macro/microeconomics of innovation.
12. Systematic selection of suitable Open Innovation methods – Mattias Guertler
    The performance of Open Innovation (OI) is closely linked to the selection of suitable OI-methods, such as idea-contests, toolkits or cross-industry-innovations. It directly influences the quantity and quality of gained knowledge as well as appropriate incentives. As studies showed, selecting suitable OI-methods is still a challenge for companies, especially when unexperienced with OI.
13. Governance of open innovation networks with national vs. international scope – Thomas Clauss
    As firms need to create new products or services continuously, particularly small and midsized enterprises are required to collaborate with different stakeholders in networks in order to share relevant knowledge, distribute risks and improve frequency and performance of new product developments.
14. Challenges Adopting Open Innovation Practices in a Public Research Institute – Thomas van Lancker
    The preliminary analysis shows challenges linked to team composition such as lack of T-shaped researcher, absorptive capacity and relational capacity, issues related to project design, e.g. tension between innovation development and PhD-research, inefficient steering committees and unclear definition of roles and tasks, and problematic organizational characteristics such as culture causing an unconducive climate for open innovation activities.
15. Exploring New Aspects of Inbound Open Innovation: the Consolidation Index – Marco Greco
    This article studies an unexplored third approach to inbound open innovation: using the firm’s external sources at the highest degree of intensity. To this aim, it introduces a novel measure of inbound open innovation, the consolidation index. Using a large sample of European firms, this article describes how the consolidation index varies with the firm size, with the innovativeness of the firm’s home country and with the innovativeness of its sector. Finally, it describes its interaction with other inbound open innovation measures and explores its impact on innovation performance.
    

Last week, 233 papers have been presented at the ISPIM conference. Although not proceeded yet, the papers and abstracts are already available for ISPIM members. Being a member, I was able to scan all the abstracts, titles and keywords for trending topics. After a few manual adjustments, such as combining words and ignoring research-related terminology I could come up with the following wordcloud. It identifies the main topics that are currently trending in innovation management.

So what can we conclude:

Trending Topics

The top 10 of trending topics definitely are (leaving some that don’t mean anything without context):

1. Technology
2. Business
3. Processes
4. Open Innovation
5. New Product
6. Development
7. Services
8. Performance
9. Market
10. Entrepreneurship

Question Marks

Question marks to me are the topics that haven’t been mentioned quite often in recent research, but from which we could expect that they would be studied a bit more (because they are hot or because they have been studied widely in the past). The infamous list of question marks would be as followed:

1. Society
2. End-users
3. Education
4. Culture
5. Consumers
6. Incubators
7. Co-Creation
8. Tools
9. Diversity
10. Networks

To me it seems interesting that many terms in this list refer to co-creation (end-users, consumers, co-creation, networks – although it must be said that words as collaboration and customers end up higher in the word cloud). This topic has been researched widely over the last few years, but seems to gain less interest this year. Also the cultural aspects get less attention then would be expected (knowing that innovation management basically is all about changing behaviour).

“If you go from Moscow to Budapest, you think you are in Paris. And if you go from Paris to Budapest, you think you are in Moscow,” as Gyorgy Ligeti very sharply noticed, perfectly describes the location of the XXVI ISPIM Conference in Budapest. ISPIM, short for International Society for Professional Innovation Management, organized this worldwide event once a year. A place to be for everyone involved in Innovation Management, both practitioners and scholars.

It was my first time at the conference, had the opportunity to meet lots of friends from around the globe on the one hand and meet a wide variety of new people in the field. The conference is a nice combination of scientific presentations – on the edge research in the field of innovation management, 233 presentations in total -, workshops – often organized by practitioners -, keynote sessions and a very well-done social program.

With the aim of sharing what you have missed and giving you the opportunity to learn what we have learned, I will now provide you with 5 key insights I gained from the ISPIM conference. I think I can state that these insights are currently trending within the field of Innovation Management.

1. Idea Management

While this topic, as a stream within Innovation Management theory, has been studied long before, it seems to get new life during recent years. In the past Idea Management could just have been another name for Innovation Management, but nowadays it starts focusing more on the (fuzzy) front end of innovation and questions how to generate, capture and select ideas that can then turn into interesting business cases. A few articles discuss the impact of this topic. For instance, Olga Kokshagina proposed that idea absorption is an issue: “Still, the absorption of isolated novel ideas in OI initiatives remains as an issue. […] We find that the intermediary platform can incorporate functions to automatize the absorptive capacity and facilitate further diffusion of ideas.” Or within the world of startups, where capturing ideas can be difficult: “Start-ups are suffering from white spots bringing their business idea to a successful market entry.” (Hubert Preisinger). Some of the presentations also discussed the wide variety of tools dealing with ‘idea management’. One of them Peter Robbins, who argues that design thinking can help: “They used ethnographic research; involved customers, tour operators, historians, community activists and artists, and used them to develop a portfolio of novel ideas implementation,” and TaeWan Kim who explained so-called idea camps in Korea: “In this paper, we introduced the methodology for implementing creative ideas to products or services within two or three years by presenting the idea camp case in Korea.”

While there is still a lack of a definition of Idea Management, we’ll probably run into more elaborated literature reviews and structured research on this topic in the near future.

2. Games: strategy simulation games and gamification

While serious games are already capturing business (and education) for a few years, the topic has still been underdeveloped in research. During the conference we had to opportunity to actually play a few games, such as the Foresights Cards – a card game about taking strategic decision making – and the Innovation Management Game – a business simulation game about the paradoxes of Innovation Management. Moreover, there were a few presentations about case studies on the use of serious games in a business environment. Roalt Aalmoes discussed that “serious games have the potential to become a serious tool to facilitate change processes. This research contributes to our understanding of serious gaming for change in two ways. First, it shows how serious games can be used to support change processes. Second, it provides insights how stakeholders can be made aware of introducing technological innovations using a serious game.”. Moreover, a “Multidisciplinary approach on developing innovative ideas was mixed with gamification elements, and flow experience can help break down barriers towards economics in non-business students and open their mind to such innovation,” according to Maria Bodone Harsanyi. Edward Faber proposed a model for analysing edutainment applications: “By following action research principles this study develops a comprehensive framework that enables more systematical data collection on the design and impact of edutainment applications, in particular serious games and gamification, from learning and learner’s points of view.”

While serious games are widely studies, their implication for innovation management (and education in innovation management) has been underdeveloped in research. There is a need of much more quantitative research on this topic, because it will definitely create a disruption in innovation management.

3. User Involvement

A long-time favorite in Innovation Management, the involvement of users in the innovation process is again growing interest among innovation professionals. This year a wide variety of tools and paradigms for user involvement have been discussed. One of them being “innovation mining”: “Innovation mining is a modern social media analysis technology specifically focusing on innovation related topics. Whereas common social media monitoring techniques are mainly used to gather insights about brand perception or media impact, innovation mining aims to match technologies and product attributes with relevant user-centred applications,” according Michael Bartl. Or the so-called Living Labs method: “Within recent years it has become more important to involve end-users during innovation development processes. One approach in which end-users are involved intensively is the Living Lab approach, in which end-users are studied in their natural, real-life context,” as proposed by Annabel Georges. The Award-winning paper of Seppo Leminen also discusses Living Labs: “This paper examines the tensions, and paradoxes related to open innovation taking place in living labs. […] This study focuses on three main classes of tensions that characterize open innovation in living labs: management, users, and the way of working. Another approach that seemed very interesting is the innovation lab: “The promise of collaboration has for long been holding the attention of the academics, practitioners and policy makers alike as open innovation, user-led innovation or open source have steadily gained in prominence. Yet, meeting the grand challenges of tomorrow will require a far more extreme approach – one that enables true interaction to encourage radical innovation, crossing the previously uncrossable boundaries and leveraging technologies to tap into collaborative, rather than just collective, creativity. We propose to investigate ‘innovation labs’, an emergent form of collaborative innovation aiming to do just that.” (Anne-Laure Mention). One more presentation I’d like to mention, is about co-innovation: “To explicate customers’ behaviours and competence in co-innovation, this research will employ ‘user-innovators’ as the main body of knowledge and examine them in all stages of NPD process.” (Mai Khanh Tran).

While this topic is high flying within innovation management, one question from the public towards the presenting scholars triggered me: “Did you yourself actually used tools of user involvement in your research.” A question that still is unanswered, saying it all: disappointingly, many scholars still don’t approach (enough) their final customers in their research. A few of them mentioned that the academic world is their main target group (which it isn’t), but none of them actually collaborated (which is not the same as interviewing) practitioners, companies, users and civilians in their research.

4. Crisis-driven Innovation

This topic was brought up by only one scholar during the conference: John Bessant, famous saxophone player in the ISPIM-band and publisher of many innovation books. As noted in his abstract: “Crises, whether natural or man-made, require rapid problem solving if agencies and aid workers are to avoid the huge negative impacts of such disasters. That makes consideration of how innovation takes place in this sector an urgent challenge. Our paper summarizes the nature of the challenge and reviews experience so far in humanitarian innovation (HI). There is a second issue which we also explore. Arguably crisis conditions provide a ‘laboratory’ for exploring alternative approaches and generating novel innovation trajectories which might diffuse more widely – the concept of ‘reverse innovation’.”

A very interesting topic which I’d definitely like to hear more about in the future.

5. Networking

In Chesbrough’s 2006 book, Simard and West proposed the model of wide vs. deep ties. For Open Innovation it has long been argued that wide ties are very important. They create a source pool for knowledge and new ideas. Not surprisingly, this is probably the most important aspect of the ISPIM conference: the social program. The opening drink, the pauses, the lunch breaks, the walks through Budapest, the luxury diner at the Opera, the drink before – and after – the diner, the classical music, the bars, the boat trip, the drinks before – and after – the boat trip, the ISPIM-band, the wedding proposal during the boat trip, it all contributes to creating a lot of new wide ties. Connections that make the conference an awesome thing to be at and that will be of much more importance in the future than we could ever imagine.

Thanks to the organisers, Iain Bitran, Steffen Conn, David Farell and the many workshop leaders for this wonderful event.