Simple but effective: I’ve tried to combine the excellent framework of 10 Types of Innovation (Keeley et al, 2013) with the highly successful framework of the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder, Pigneur et al, 2008). I wasn’t the first one to come up with this idea, some others have plotted the 10 types on the BMC before, such as Huw Griffiths on Medium or Heather McQuaid on Slideshare.
Please download the file below and check out the example of Apple (based on the gameplan in Keeley’s book).
When the book “Ten Types of Innovation” (Keeley et al.), in its most recent format, hit the shelves in 2013 – not only me, but many of my colleagues in higher education, embraced the work because of its clarity and integrality. It offered a much richer approach than the usual – perhaps more scientifically evidenced – approach of 4 types of innovation (product innovation, process innovation, business model innovation, service innovation). The work was, and still is, one of the most influential works used in our Business Innovation program and highly rewarded by both students and partners in the field. The infographic I made in 2014 based on this book has been one of the most downloaded infographics on this blog ever since.
Parallel to that, but completely different in its approach, the work “Ten Faces of Innovation” (Kelley), acquired the same fame over the years. It was highly rewarded as a book that offered an approach to dealing with different roles in innovation teams – roles that were not necessarily bound to 1 person and are highly practical from nature – much more practical than for instance the typology mentioned in the Innovator’s DNA – which looks at roles from a more abstract, ambidextrous, point-of-view. The Ten Faces shouldn’t be used to tag people with specific skills (something that for instance DISC does), but can be used to start a deliberate conversation with your (innovation) team members about their strengths and ambitions.
But something that neither of them discuss is the existence and consistence of innovation teams. In innovation science the construct of an ‘innovation team’ is often overlooked – as if there is only one sort of innovation teams: the team that innovates and is run by innovators. In reality however, I came across many distinguishing approaches to what we could call innovation teams. They all have different set-ups and different aims. Drawing on my own experience (examples below) and backed by the models of Ten Types of Innovation and Ten Faces of Innovation, I deducted 10 Types of Innovation Teams. Let me introduce them to you:
Spun-off Innovation Teams are teams consisting of seasoned entrepreneurs who have gained experience in SME or large corporations, created or designed a highly marketable technology or business model. They usually patent their idea from within the mothership and from then on collaborate with them to spin-out their business to increase chances of bringing it to market successfully.
Tiger Teams are one-of-a-kind. They consist of influential innovators or project managers from within your organization. Their task usually is to dive into an immediate problem and come up with an innovative solution to overcome the problems. A problem could be that one of your suppliers is financially unstable, which rings all bells in your organization’s risk analysis. A Tiger Team can then be sent to the supplier to “overtake” their current business operations, create innovative managerial solutions and get things back on track. A Tiger Team could also intervene internally in organizational redesign or when opening up your business model. Tiger Teams will be able to deal with resistance and have a strong focus on the human impact of change.
Formal Innovation Teams are the teams we usually refer then framing innovation teams. They consist of powerful innovators with vision and a strong internal and external network to get things done. Innovation is not something they ‘do’ fulltime: they are freed of other tasks for 1-2 days a week and use this time to create shared visions, initiate new projects or follow top-down leads that may be interesting. They usually have some kind of stage-gate-model in place to be able to monitor and report about their progress.
Strategy Teams are responsible for developing new strategic directions. They thoroughly research market trends and user experiences in order to design new visions and possible scenarios for the organizations. Their task is to report continuously about these findings and suggest the creation of new business models for the organizations. They usually operate at a high level in the organization, are usually multidisciplinary and strongly intertwined with experts from universities to help them grasp the most important findings.
Product Innovation Teams are an export product of the Agile Movement. Many organizations have recently transformed into ‘agile communities’ which includes (temporary, but fulltime) product innovation teams who are responsible for the full development of an idea completely to a market-ready stage. In digital companies they may take the form of scrum teams. The teams are usually flexible, but dedicated and result-oriented. They are makers and make sure to test and validate the product with users before its final implementation.
Accelerator Teams operate with innovation on another level: they don’t innovate themselves, but the facilitate innovation in their organization – using an innovative approach in doing so. They create spirit, they create learning spaces, they create inspiration, they build bridges, they make seemingly unrelated relations. With their approach they create a climate for innovation within the company that, in the long run, creates a process of continuous reinvention of the organization.
Startup Teams consist of young, usually relatively unexperienced, innovators that have a specific mission in mind and are willing to iterate as long as possible until the mission becomes reality. They focus on creating minimum viable products and building strong brands on top of that. They create a flavor of freshness around the product and do not settle for known paths to market. To start online and stay online.
The informal nnovation teams breath idea generation. These are hidden ‘teams’, walking between the lines of the other teams. The create ideas at a non-stop basis and their influence in the organizations to bring the ideas to the more formal teams in order to realize them. Behind the scenes, they’ll stay involve to see how their ideas end up or if they should pull some more strings. These kind of teams are highly valuable to organizations: they exist everywhere, but are only appreciated in organizations with a strong innovation climate. They don’t want to be formalized, so let them be.
Community Teams drive innovation through the (user) community of the organizations. They try to continuously interact with the customers and involve external users in the creation of new opportunities for offering increased service and enhanced customer satisfaction. They use visual techniques and are tech-savvy in their ways to reach out and they growth hack their way into your innovation funnel. Their ideas may just be as good as the anthropologist’s ideas.
Window Teams are highly specialized in reinventing your brand and reputation. They will ideate, design and implement innovations that the outside world sees when googling for your organization. They usually consist of marketing-communication experts, graphical designers and fashionista’s and usually operate at a high level in the organization, because it’s not what’s good that gets the attention of the board but what gets wrong. Not having Window Teams may be bad for your reputation: nobody still believes that your product sells itself, do you?
Still a holy grail in market research: the DESTEP – STEEPLE – method. It is taught in almost every business-related course in the world and a very powerful tool to map trends for strategic purposes.
However, there are a few fatal flaws that may cause users of this method to miss out on important opportunities:
Especially for the aim of doing strategic research within public institutes, such as (semi-)governmental organizations, non-govermental organization, education institutions and – yes, with their bureaucracy they function as public institutions as well – institutionalized corporations, the DESTEP-method doesn’t work. It is therefore that I came up and validated the TREINDI-approach: a futuring technique for public organizations.
It consists of 7 categories that need to be addressed, in the right order, when doing strategic research for radically new or high-impact strategic changes. Examples may be:
When following these 7 categories, it creates a waterfall of ideas that may then be plotted in framework for further analysis.
Ask yourself these questions when looking this magnificent 7.
When you understand the different phenomena, follow the following 4 steps to conclude your research
First of all, make sure to take 2-3 months to complete your research: assuming you have about 8 hours/week available I would advise to do the following:
Now, this is the most work. Go through all of your material and step by step plot them in the circle. You’ll be able to use thicker lines for trends that may have more impact on your organizations, and you may plot them closer to the ‘Zone of Impact’ if you think they will be of relevance sooner than others.
Now, start categorizing the results by theme. Discuss this with a steering group and colleagues and try to find 4 or 5 different categories that summarize opportunities for your organization. Color them by category (don’t rearrange them) and try to draw starting points as well, depicting the current state of your business and making the gap clear.
This is a whole tool in itself, but I’m supposing for now you’re familiar with that. Draw a new business model for each of the different categories. Discuss it with colleagues and redesign them until you’re happy about. Start some pilots. Draw a final report for the archives.
Congrats, you’ve made it, that’s kind of treindi!
In december I reached out to both Alexander Osterwalder and John Bessant and asked them what is the most important organizational skill for engaging continuously with innovation. Their answers were almost the same:
Shorty after, I read an article by Ayse Birsel, on Inc.com1. She also talked to asked Alexander Osterwalder and asked him the question why ‘designers who are fluent at business strategy’ and ‘business people who are fluent at design’ are so different to each other. He could easily name 8 differences between the two of them, but the article concluded with the statement that organizations are in need of both explorers and exploiters – or evolutionaries and revolutionaires2.
In management theory, this has long been referred to as organizational ambidexterity:> the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed.3
I discussed this construct briefly in an article last September.4. The construct usually deals with exploration on the one hand, and exploitation on the other hand. But reading the comments of Osterwalder and Birsel, and some other material that appeared online in December, I wasn’t exactly sure if exploration could be compared with ‘designer’ and exploitation could be compared with ‘business people’. I started to draw upon that idea, talked to a few people and figured that the construct of ambidexterity could actually be described in more detail when taking into account all 4 of these:
This may need some clarification and finds it origin in Trkman & DaSilva’s 2014 work on What is a business model and what is not?5. Trkman & DaSilva argue that while strategy creation is an activity that focuses on the long-term, business model generation is something that focuses on the short-term:
We concur that 'every organization has some business model' and 'not every organization has a strategy' (Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart, 2010, p. 206), we further emphasize that strategy reflects what a company aims to become, while business models describe what a company really is at a given time.6
Trkman & DaSilva7
This leads to the following two extremes on the horizontal axis. Following scientific evidence on ambidextrous organizations it could be stated that magic happens when business model generation meets strategy creation.
This part is more in line with the discussion I had with Alexander Osterwalder and John Bessant. Among researchers, the intersection of design and management (science) has long been a topic of discussion. There is a growing group of scientists, mostly in business (engineering) that believe that management science is in fact a design-oriented science and that the two are as such inextricably intertwined with each other. Especially in the field of Entrepreneurship, there are findings that this is true:
We conclude that the interaction between the two (creative rdesign and scientific validation) can drive the continual renewal of the entrepreneurship field and unlock the potential of an inclusive body of knowledge that is both rigorous and relevant. (Romme & Reymen, 2018)8
In order to elaborate on the magic that happens when design meets business we should therefore look at theory on entrepreneurship that deals with this magic. One of the most relevant theories on that is the ever-lasting battle between Schumpeter and Kirzner. The Schumpetarian approach argues that organizations try to create something new9, while Kirzner argues that it's about seizing existing opportunities10. Research has shown that organizations deal with different strategies over time and that organizational design takes a more flexible approach in order to simultaneously deal with both effectuation and causation11 12., which can be seen in the following example:
This leads to the following two extremes on the vertical axis.
John Bessant and Joe Tidd created a model for developing and testing innovation capabilities in their 2009 work Managing Innovation.13 In 2015, Ferreira et al tested the assumptions and different capabilities Tidd & Bessant proposed and draw conclusions on the most interesting measurable capabilities for a sophisticated innovation strategy.14. A few of the most important capabilities were:
Haanaes, Reeves & World argue that only 2% of the companies are part of the elite group of organization who understand that you have to excel at both efficiency and innovation. They find that the above-mentioned may be true: “Maintaining an outside-in perspective starts by continuously scanning the market, both demand and supply.”15
In the visual I’ve included 28 capabilities that drive innovation on each of the extremes of the innovation landscape. Balancing the focus between them brings you closer to the 2%.
Each organization may have a different starting point, so each path to ambidexterity should be personalized. But roughly, we could distinguish four types of organizations with their corresponding paths to ambidexterity:
Below, you’ll find an example of the Scale-up Path and the capabilities they could strive for.
https://www.inc.com/ayse-birsel/how-opposites-attract-in-love-business.html ↩︎
https://www.inc.com/ayse-birsel/there-are-4-innovation-personalities-which-one-are-you.html ↩︎
O'Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2013). Organizational ambidexterity: Past, present, and future. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(4), 324–338. ↩︎
http://innographics.nl/2018/09/05/typology-for-innovative-organizations/ ↩︎
DaSilva, C. M., & Trkman, P. (2014). Business model: What it is and what it is not. Long Range Planning, 47(6), 379–389. ↩︎
DaSilva, C. M., & Trkman, P. (2014). Business model: What it is and what it is not. Long Range Planning, 47(6), 379–389. ↩︎
DaSilva, C. M., & Trkman, P. (2014). Business model: What it is and what it is not. Long Range Planning, 47(6), 379–389. ↩︎
Georges Romme, A. L., & MMJ Reymen, I. (2018). Entrepreneurship at the interface of design and science: Toward an inclusive framework * Entrepreneurship at the interface of design and science: Toward an inclusive framework, 10. ↩︎
De Jong, J. P. J., & Marsili, O. (2010). Schumpeter versus Kirzner: An empirical investigation of opportunity types. ↩︎
Kirzner, I. M. (2009). The alert and creative entrepreneur: a clarification. Small Business Economics, 32(2), 145–152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-008-9153-7 ↩︎
Reymen, I. M. M. J., Andries, P., Berends, H., Mauer, R., Stephan, U., & Burg, E. (2015). Understanding dynamics of strategic decision making in venture creation: a process study of effectuation and causation. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 9(4), 351–379. ↩︎
Gibson, C., & Birkinshaw, J. (2004). Building Ambidexterity into an Organization Topic: Leadership and Organizational Studies. Reprint 45408, (4), 47–55. ↩︎
Tidd, J., & Bessant, J. (2009). Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market, and organizational change. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. ↩︎
Ferreira, J. J. M., Fernandes, C. I., Alves, H., & Raposo, M. L. (2015). Drivers of innovation strategies: Testing the Tidd and Bessant (2009) model ☆. Journal of Business Research, 68, 1395–1403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.01.021 ↩︎
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/Connect/Rotman-MAG/Current-Issue/Winter2019-FreeFeatureArticle-The2PercentCompany?hss_channel=tw-162094534 ↩︎
It has been a while since Henry Mintzberg developed his influential work that made us aware of the importance of structures in organization design. To my opinion, Mintzberg’s work was a refreshing change to the world of organization design that until then has been largely influenced by Taylor’s Scientific Management Approach and Henry Ford’s efficiency-based adaptation of that.
As an entrepreneur and lecturer in organization science I find myself still using Mintzberg-related terminology on a regular base: ‘professional organizations’, ‘top management’, ‘middle management’, ‘hierarchy’ or ‘organization charts’. While these terms may be common language in business and as such might be useful in having a common understanding of what we’re talking about, much of it is outdated: organization design has shifted it’s focus over time. Structures are no longer of primary focus in design organizations. In fact, building blocks as ‘middle management’ might only still exist on paper today. Let me show you how the focus of organization design has changed over the years:
| Scholar | Organization Design in their eyes |
| Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) | Organization Design encompasses the development of task packages for employees that align with their strengths and competencies. It enhances productivity. |
| Henry Ford (1913) | Ford embraced the idea that not tasks should be optimized, but processes should be optimized and automatized: organization design is the effective and efficient design of processes. |
| Henry Mintzberg (1979) | Mintzberg looked at organization design from a perspective of structures. |
| Robert Quinn & Kim Cameron (1983) | Quinn & Cameron argued that organization can be defined by their cultures and introduced their Competencies Values Framework. |
| Larry Greiner (1989) | Greiner discussed in his work Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow that all of the before are true, but change over time for a growing company. |
| Steve Blank (1995) | Steve Blank argued, while coining the term Customer Development, that organization design needs to support the value proposition of organizations. |
But times are changing and organizations are emerging, scaling and managed completely differently. New generations, societal change, sustainable goals and disruptive technology require organizations to be much more flexible, self-reinventing organisms that don’t fit above-mentioned design principles. They require openness, transparency, adaptability, co-creation, self-management and responsiveness. While searching for a modern-day typology for innovative organizations – to show our students and what kind of context they most likely would want to work – I found that none was there, so I created a new one.
Below you’ll find an overview of the new typologies that I’d like to propose. The model describes organizational typologies based on cultures of innovation. This model is drawn upon a combination of Quinn & Cameron's values framework (2011) and Nagji and Tuff's innovation ambition framework (2012). The typology proposes 4 types of organizations. Each type of organization exists in three different levels of innovation. At the centre are the innovation brokers: consultancy firms, education professionals and knowledge brokers who do not directly work with innovation, but accelerate it (Chesbrough, 2007).
On the right-hand side you’ll see a more structured-approach to the new typologies. All of Mintzberg’s types would now be grouped under ‘traditional structures’.
Figure 1: Typology for Innovative Organizations. The figure in the middle was initially published in 2018 in the internal document Professional Profile Business Innovation at Avans University of Applied Sciences which I co-authored with the aim of explaining students in what environment they are most likely to find jobs after graduating.
Innovation Management focuses on creating and managing sustainable business (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010; Keeley, Walters, Pikkel, & Quinn, 2013).
Romme (2016) argued that we are now far beyong early thinkers as Taylor and Ford and that organizational learning is a key aspect for innovative organizations (drawn from i.e. Garud & Van De Ven, 1992; Romme, 2016; Romme & Endenburg, 2006, Simon, 1991) and for business model innovation (Berends, Smits, Reymen, & Podoynitsyna, 2016; DaSilva & Trkman, 2014). Organizational learning helps innovative organizations to deal with the ever-changing, unsure and unpredictable context of business (Van De Vrande, 2017).
As a result, ‘typologies’ are not as black-and-white as they used to be. Organizations are now ambidextrous by nature: 'the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed' (O'Reilly & Tushman, 2013, p. 2) and has been widely studied (i.e. structured ambidexterity; O'Reilly & Tushman, 2008; i.e. contextual ambidexterity; Birkinshaw & Gibson, 2004). As such, a modern-day typology for innovative organizations should deal with ambiguity in organizations.
Ambiguity isn’t new: the 'Schumpetarian approach' and the 'Kirznerian approach' have widely discussed over the last decades. The Schumpetarian approach argues that organizations try to create something new (De Jong & Marsili, 2010; Schumpeter, 1934), while Kirzner argues that it’s about seizing existing opportunities (Kirzner, 1999). Research has shown that organizations deal with different strategies over time and that organizational design takes a more flexible approach in order to simultaneously deal with both effectuation and causation (Samuelsson & Davidsson, 2009; Johnson, Craig, & Hildebrand, 2006; Shane, 2003; Busenitz, 1996; Walrave, van Oorschot, and Romme, 2011; De Jong & Marsili, 2010; Reymen et al., 2015, Christensen, 2011, Birkinshaw & Gibson, 2004, Kelley, 2005).
An updated version of typologies is useful because it adopts new discussions, for instance about overexploitation (Raworth, 2017), innovation (Coley, 2009) and sustainability (Griggs et al, 2013; Sachs, 2012, United Nations, 2017) and puts them at the heart of organizational typology. As such, education programs and public instances would be more accurate in their teaching – which has a strong influence on future economic developments (Georghiou & Sachwald, 2017, p. 29). It follows up on trends in education to break the shift towards a more entrepreneurial environment into a model of multisided value creation (Manshanden et al, 2014; Zwaan, 2016)
The model can be used in three different ways:
– Berends, H., Jelinek, M., Reymen, I., & Stultiëns, R. (2014). Product innovation processes in small firms: Combining entrepreneurial effectuation and managerial causation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(3), 616–635. doi:10.1111/jpim.12117
– Berends, H., Smits, A., Reymen, I., & Podoynitsyna, K. (2016). Learning while (re)configuring: Business model innovation processes in established firms. Strategic Organization, 14(3), 181–219. doi:10.1177/1476127016632758
– Birkinshaw, J., & Gibson, C. (2004). Building ambidexterity into an organization. MIT Sloan Management Review, (4), 47–55.
– Busenitz, L. W. (1996). Research on entrepreneurial alertness: Sampling, measurement, and theoretical issues. Journal of Small Business Management, 34(4), 35.
– Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). Diagnosing and changing organizational culture: Based on the
competing values framework. John Wiley & Sons.
– Chesbrough, H. W. (2007). Why companies should have open business models. MIT Sloan Management Review, 48(2), 22–28.
– Coley, S. (2009). Enduring ideas: The three horizons of growth. McKinsey Quarterly.
– Crossan, M. M., & Apaydin, M. (2010). A multi‐dimensional framework of organizational innovation: A systematic review of the literature. Journal of Management Studies, 47(6), 1154–1191. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2009.00880.x
– DaSilva, C. M., & Trkman, P. (2014). Business model: What it is and what it is not. Long Range Planning, 47(6), 379–389. doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2013.08.004
De Jong, J. P. J., & Marsili, O. (2010). Schumpeter versus Kirzner: An empirical investigation of opportunity types. EIM Business and Policy Research, Scales Research Reports.
– Garud, R., & Van De Ven, A. H. (1992). An empirical evaluation of the internal corporate venturing process. Strategic Management Journal, 13(S1), 93–109. doi:10.1002/smj.4250131008
Georghiou, L., & Sachwald, F. (2017). Europe's future: Open innovation, open science, open to the world: Reflections of the Research, Innovation and Science Policy Experts (RISE) High Level Group. Retrieved from the EU Publications website: https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/527ea7ce-36fc-11e7-a08e-01aa75ed71a1
– Griggs, D., Stafford-Smith, M., Gaffney, O., Rockström, J., Öhman, M. C., Shyamsundar, P., … Noble, I. (2013). Policy: Sustainable development goals for people and planet. Nature, 495(7441), 305–307. doi:10.1038/495305a
– Keeley, L., Walters, H., Pikkel, R., & Quinn, B. (2013). Ten types of innovation: The discipline of building breakthroughs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
– Kirzner, I. M. (1999). Creativity and/or alertness: A reconsideration of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Review of Austrian Economics, 11, 5–17. doi:10.1023/A:1007719905868
– Lawrence, K. (2013). Developing leaders in a VUCA environment. UNC Executive Development, 1–15. Retrieved from https://www.emergingrnleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/developing-leaders-in-a-vuca-environment.pdf
– Manshanden, W., de Heide, M., Koops, O., van der Horst, T., Poliakov, E., Bulasvkaya, T., … Bekkers, F. (2014). De Staat van Nederland Innovatieland: R&D: impuls voor economische groei. Special issue [The State of the Netherlands as an Innovation Country: R&D: Impetus for economic growth]. The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.
– Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. London: Chelsea Green Publishing.
– Nagji, B., & Tuff, G. (2012). Managing Your innovation portfolio. Harvard Business Review, 66. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/05/managing-your-innovation-portfolio
– O'Reilly, C. A., III, & Tushman, M. L. (2008). Ambidexterity as a dynamic capability: Resolving the innovator's dilemma. Research in Organizational Behavior, 28, 185–206. doi:10.1016/j.riob.2008.06.002
– O'Reilly, C. A., III, & Tushman, M. L. (2013). Organizational ambidexterity: Past, present, and future. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(4), 324–338. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2285704
– Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business model generation: A handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
– Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G., & Smith, A. (2014). Value proposition design: How to create products and services customers want. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
– Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. London: Chelsea Green Publishing.
– Reymen, I. M. M. J., Andries, P., Berends, H., Mauer, R., Stephan, U., & Burg, E. (2015). Understanding dynamics of strategic decision making in venture creation: A process study of effectuation and causation. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 9(4), 351–379. doi:10.1002/sej.1201
– Romme, G. (2016). The quest for professionalism: The case of management and entrepreneurship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
– Sachs, J. D. (2012). From millennium development goals to sustainable development goals. The Lancet, 379(9832), 2206–2211. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60685-0
– Samuelsson, M., & Davidsson, P. (2009). Does venture opportunity variation matter? Investigating systematic process differences between innovative and imitative new ventures. Small Business Economics, 33(2), 229–255. doi:10.1007/s11187-007-9093-7
– Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The theory of economic development: An inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and the business cycle (Vol. 55). Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
– Shane, S. A. (2003). A general theory of entrepreneurship: The individual-opportunity nexus. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
– Simon, H. A. (1991). Bounded rationality and organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 125–134. doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.125
– Tushman, M., Lakhani, K., & Lifshitz-Assaf, H. (2012). Open innovation and organization design. Journal of Organization Design, 1(1), 24–27. doi:10.7146/jod.6336
– United Nations. (2017, May 17). Innovators, UN discuss using tech to tackle world's development challenges. Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/05/557562-innovators-un-discuss-using-tech-tackle-worlds-development-challenges
– Van De Vrande, V. (2017). Collaborative innovation: Creating opportunities in a changing world. ERIM Inaugural Address Series Research in Management. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/100028
– Walrave, B., van Oorschot, K. E., & Romme, A. G. L. (2011). Getting trapped in the suppression of exploration: A simulation model. Journal of Management Studies, 48(8), 1727–1751. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01019.x
– Zwaan, B. van der. (2016). Haalt de universiteit 2040? Een Europees perspectief op wereldwijde kansen en bedreigingen [Will the university reach 2040? A European perspective on worldwide opportunities and threats]. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
As part of a simulation game on innovation management we have been running at universities and in corporate training programs for over 4 years now, we have developed an integrative model for dealing with innovation management on a daily basis. Innovation Management is a strategic activity that isn’t necessarily needed to implement throughly for every company. Mostly large companies have included structured processes that include administrative stages to following the (large number of) project that are in progress and to be able to follow-up on them and calculate the effect of innovation management in general. For smaller companies however, that is not general practice: having such a formal process in place simply doesn’t weigh up to cost efficiencies will generate. But for them, innovation management is just as important – but they rather use a toolkit than a formal process. Based on our 8 Types of Innovation Processes model this is a useful canvas design that makes it easy to start working on formalizing your innovation activities and processes in your organization.
Based on three categories – value creation, strategy and operations – you would be able to start improving the activities of your organization.
It has been a while since Henry Chesbrough coined the term Open Innovation and formulated it’s definition: “combining internal and external ideas as well as internal and external paths to market to advance the development of new technologies.” (Chesbrough, 2003). In the course of time, the terminology surrounding Open Innovation has evolved alongside developments in management literature and practises. Open Innovation as a paradigm on itself is on its quest to touch base. Rather than taking a (technical) process-oriented approach, Open Innovation is now also about Open Business Models (Chesbrough, 2006), Open Services (Chesbrough, 2010) – both from a more strategic perspective – and practical tools (Vanhaverbeeke, 2017) – more from a tactical or operational point-of-view.
While it could be argued if Open Innovation is the best approach to be used as a general framework to put different strategic, tactical and operational activities into perspective, it is useful to try. So that’s what I did below: I used to initial Open Innovation framework, based on the innovation funnel, to describe and position a long, but non-exclusive, list of activities that are related to Open Innovation. Of course, also other frameworks could be used to do so, but this seemed like a solid approach.
The infographic includes 33 routes to Open Innovation, ordened by:
The goal of this framework: to give you an idea of all the possibilities that come with Open Innovation, where you could start and in what stage of your internal process it comes in (most) handy.
The process of sourcing for external knowledge, patents or technology and to formalize the use of that information in your own innovation process. The ‘license’ often include information about the collaborators, how the risks are shared, how the pofits are shared and to what extend the technology or information may or may not be altered or adapted.
The process of collaboration between inventors and joined registration for a patent that may be used for further exploration and exploitation onwards. The effect has been studied by for instance Belderbos and it also an indication of the strength of (inter)regional collaboration, according to OECD.
A spin-off is a form of Open Innovation in the sense that a company can ‘spin-off’ a newly developed technology to the public market for further exploitation by the involved engineers or startup team. It thus a technique to split off an early innovation in the hope that, when it leaves it mother’s wings, it will become more successfull on his own.
Collaborative Innovation is a branche within Open Innovation that studies the effect of temporary Open Innovation-projects with a single goal in mind, such as the creation of a new product or the development of a new service. It is as such not a paradigm but a program management method. Vareska van de Vrande was recently appointed as professor of Collaborative Innovation at the Rotterdam School of Business.
Collaborative engineering: a term mainly used in conventional manufacturing and production industry, with a focus on collaboration between two or more partners in the full process of design, engineering and manufacturing with multidisciplinary teams and supply chain integration.
A different approach to open innovation because it is more about HRM and than about the processes itself that become open. Co-learning is about the collaborative learning platforms or trajectories for personnel in order to gain new skills, both on operational level as on more tactical or strategic levels. The knowledge than flows back into the company making the influx of knowledge applicable to business processes. For instance: Faems (2006) and Rowley, Kupiec-Teahan and Leeman (1983)
A spin-out differs from a spin-off in the sense that the technology or startup-team is moving to another ‘mothership’ in the form of an acquisition, merger or (most likely, because the former two usually don’t happen at this early stage) a joint venture.
Basically, this is about having a business model in place that exploits the opportunities that arise because of Open Innovation. Businesses with Open Innovation-based Business Models usually are trying to take the place of innovation intermediaries in Open Innovation networks. They can for instance be inventors with the sole purpose of registering and selling intellectual property. Or they can be network brokers. More information in Weiblen (2014) and Chesbrough (2010) when he describes these companies as merchants.
Out-licensing is one of the most important strategies within Outbound Open Innovation. Outbound Open Innovation is a core principle of the Open Innovation Paradigm and includes for instance also spin-offs and spin-outs. Out-licensing explores gainin external rewards for internally developped technologies. More information: Lichtenthaler (2009).
This approach could also have been placed underneath the funnel: co-design usually happens with both partners and customers and is meant to have a more human-centered design approach in your R&D-funnel. It has become a main topic of research within design thinking. More info: Steen, Manschot & De Koning (2011).
Open Business Models are all-inclusive approaches to Open Innovation: “Open Business Models take a broad perspective of ‘resources’ that are exchanged and shared with the ecosystem. […] It is seen as an ecoystem-aware way of value-creation and capturing. (Weiblen, 2014). As such, firms with an Open Business Model collaborate with its ecoystem by building up partner-networks, platforms. The process of ‘opening up the business model’ is often referred to as Business Model Innovation.
Although the term is almost the same as the before-mentioned approach, ‘Open Business‘ is something completely different. An Open Business embeds a business model that aims to publicly share all data and information. It is related to open source, freeware and open science.
Collaborative branding refers to the fact that a network of organizations join to create a synergetic branding effect. In many case they will create a joint brand that replaces the current product or company brand in order to gain a larger scale effect of the brand. This process is very common in public networks (such as Brainport, the Netherlands, were many companies use the brand Brainport rather than there own branding), but also works out for business-only partnerships, such as the Douwe Egberts and Philips co-brand Senseo. A related term is co-promotion.
Co-production – or co-manufacturing – is largely the same as co-engineering except from the fact that it focuses only the production part of the process, thus enhancing economies of scale and cost reductions in (mass) production environments.
Co-marketing, like co-branding, is about creating a synergetic effect in the commercialization stage of the innovation process. Collaborative marketing focuses on sharing distribution channels and pricing information. It involves joint teams of marketeers bringing to market different products from differnt companies.
A sectoral innovation systems describes the complete institutional environment, whose aim is to accelerate innovation and employability in a certain sector. In the EU, sectoral innovation systems have been a main focus point of both international and national programs over the last two decades. It’s effects still have to be proven.
The availability of facilities that can be used by networks of companies. From an inbound approach, a company could make use of machine labs, printing labs or hubs with design and production lines; from an outbound approach, companies could share their facilities with others. It contributes to Open Innovation because of the fact that when using these shared facilities, often new combinations or ideas arise. An example of a shared facility is the Holst Centre in Eindhoven.
A regional innovation describes the institional environment, whose aim is to accelerate innovation and employability in a certain (geographically bounded) region. An example is Brainport. I’ve previously written about regional innovation systems.
These are ecosystems that are created and driven by businesses. Another term would be clusters. While business ecosystems are more likely to be created because of commercial opportunities (and as thus may be actually quite ‘closed’ and could prevend Open Innovation from happening), they could also be created with the purpose of Open Innovation in mind.
Same as regional, but than national 😉
Field Labs are collaborative working places where businesses and knowledge institutes meet to create and develop new ideas. It’s primarily a place where students can work with professionals to create new products.
The activity of ‘sourcing’ the crowd: gather opinions, ideas, drafts, suggestions and information from the general public, sometimes – but not always – targeted to specific crowds, such as your current customers or users, a group of elite users or targets platforms (such as designers). Crowdsourcing is effective in the early stages of an innovation process because of the fact that it per definition a diverging activity and it results in a wide variety of options to choose from. The technique is not focused enough to be of use later on in the process. Be aware of having enough resourses avaiable when starting a crowdsourcing campaign, as it may go viral and require lots of hours to manage and react. As it is a form of ‘brainstorming’, the general rules of ‘brainstorming’ also apply to crowdsourcing, which includes taking every idea or opinion seriously.
Based on the popularity of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding was firstly introduced in the beginning of the 21st century in the US. Its principles are the same, but the main ‘source’ you’re looking for is not ideas or opinions, but finance for your project. Crowdfunding platforms, just like crowdsourcing platforms, deal with intellectual property rights, commons and other legal issues that come into play when dealing with using external work for your project. Crowdfunding is a hugely popular technique but has very low success rates, because of the lower entry barrier.
This is more a philosophy than a concrete activity, but at least it is fair to say that the process of opening up your data and tapping into open data is an activity. Increasingly popular in software industry, public institutes and educational institutes, opening up (big) data creates opportunities for organizations that otherwise wouldn’t be able to see and use that data. Searching for and using open data is an effective and efficient Open Innovation tool. Wikipedia states, although it misses a source, that “Some make the case that opening up official information can support technological innovation and economic growth by enabling third parties to develop new kinds of digital applications and services.”
Co-creation labs are almost identical to Fieldlabs, except from the fact that co-creation labs are mainly intended for the public to participate (customers, local civilians, et cetera). Co-creation labs are an effective way to gather feedback on newly developed prototypes and get ideas regarding branding and marketing.
The term of co-creation is used for a whole lot of different purposes, but in the context of Open Innovation is points to the fact that organizations deliberately seek contact with end customers to test and validate new ideas and prototypes and to gather new ideas for bringing the product to market. Although not intended as such, co-creation, if done right, is also an accepted marketing technique: it engages customers with your product.
Communities are groups of highly engaged customers, usually voluntarily involved with your product because of personal interest. Searching for and collaborating with these communities may increase new ideas. Lee et al (2011) argue that communities in the example of Lego, have an automatic filtering, for instance through fora, of ideas and these ideas are as such much more worth looking at than for instance ideas generated by crowdsourcing.
Primarily a public or governmental activity, e-participation tries to involve the public in (usually) gathering feedback on delivered services. It also works for companies because gathering feedback helps in validating and incrementally increasing the quality of products.
Much related to Open Data, Open Source is a philosophy adopted by software engineers to generate sources codes that are freely available. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any commercial activity involved: while the source code may be open to the public for use, only developers will understand it – and thus commercial activities can be exploited when making the software available for the public. Examples of Open Source projects are Wikipedia and WordPress.
Increasingly popular, mainly because of the growing number of freelancers and self-employed personal, co-working spaces are actually an excellent place to start networking and source for new ideas. Because of the diversity of specialists working in those places, you are more likely to gather diverse ideas, which work best in the early stages of the inonvation process. In cities such as Amsterdam co-working spaces pop-up all the time, so it’s worth to search for a space that is as diverse as possible and offers also opportunities to chat and discuss.
This is the fundamental construct behind crowdsourcing: the idea is that the ‘collective intelligence’ always outperforms individual intelligence, even of the most awarded geniuses in your expertise. Tapping into the collective intelligence is therefore a useful activity.
The concept of Smart Cities is based around the ICT-perspective on ‘intelligence’: a highly digital, hyperconnected accessible information society in which broadband is present and the main industry focuses on services and online activities. Smart Cities are a cosmopolitan view on the world, but being located in one of them opens up a wide range of opportunities for innovation.
The last route to Open Innovation focuses on the end users of your product or service. User engagement is widely researched as a highly effective approach to Open Innovation. This involves (creative) user research (Kumar) and Lead User Involvement (Bogers).
I’m quite sure there are many more techniques. Please feel free to add them and to indicate how to could be included in the graphic and I’ll update it.
This article is an extended book review of The Quest for Professionalism of George Romme, a 2016-published book by Oxford University Press. The book is a one-of-a-kind taking a much needed reflective approach to leadership and a critical note towards the level of professionalism that many of us are approaching the science of management and entrepreneurship with. His work is exceptional, because it integrates major scientific perspectives on management from a holistic point-of-view without getting too descriptive. The book chooses a slightly philosophical approach without getting too abstract. The book takes a slightly life-work approach without giving too much self-credit.
So what’s it about? It’s about the way we think of design – in its broadest sense: organization design, strategic design, theory design, business model design, and product design – in business sciences. So why is it good? It shapes clarity in the field of design thinking, because many of us seem to think nowadays that design thinking equals a hipster approach by emphatizing with customers in order to innovate more rapidly. But that is, as this book describes perfectly, not the case at all: design thinking simply equals business science. I’ll explain why.
Over the last couple of years, there has been a significant increase in the use of the term ‘Design Thinking’ in the context of management and entrepreneurship. However, the impact of design thinking in business sciences originates from Herbert Simon’s work ‘the Sciences of the Artificial’ for which he has won the Nobel Prize in 1978 – the only Nobel Prize ever awarded to a social scientist. His work focused on the dual approach of management problems: a more fundamental approach, drafting from scientific insights and solving problems ‘top-down’ and more practical approach, reflecting on real creations and validating learnings from them in science, a more design-oriented approach. Romme argues in his work that amongst others also Schon, Krippendorff and Rousseau were bridging the gap between design thinking and management. More recently, many authors have linked ‘organizational learning’ – and thus innovation – with the concept of ‘bounded rationality’- a result of Simon’s dual approach. In other words: design thinking is a necessary approach in order to come to innovation. Or better even: there is no other science in which design thinking is more appropriate than in innovation, for as in innovation sciences the explication of knowledge will always be bounded by human intentionality, environmental continency and therefore asks for a dual approach of discovering and validating. This mechanism happens at all levels, for every type of (research) question one could think of.
This so-called science-based design approach can be visualized – showing that it can be argued that solving any particular (innovation) problem in business sciences could follow a deliberate approach (roughly the red arrow) and/or an emergent approach (roughly the blue arrow):
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Actually, Romme has provided the reader with a long list of research methods/activities that could be followed when dealing with a particular innovation problem. Specific problems ask for (a combination of) specific methods, all within the science-based design method (Romme & Endenburg, 2006):
Romme, in his work, explains that by plotting the research methods on the design thinking ontology, would create a 3D-version of his model. Romme, however, doesn’t plot this 3D-model because it would become visually complex. I saw that as a challenge and have a created a 3D-model, which I coin the Design Thinking Taxonomy.
This book is, IMHO, a must-read for everyone involved in business sciences: lecturers, curriculum designers, professors, trainers. I’m quite sure that business science will evolve from its current, usually very conservative, scientific approach, into design-centered programs that are in turn increasing the level of professionalism in management and entrepreneurship.
A few weeks ago entrepreneur Valer Pop, CEO of LifeSense Group told his startup story to us at the High Tech Campus. After having a successfull career at Holst Centre, Valer decided to start his business with just a small idea: solving unwanted urine loss. He was working on this idea at Holst Centre, but after meeting co-founder Julia Veldhuijzen, Valer and she decided to start up their own business and create specialized medical underwear to help 400 million women worldwide. Early on in the process they gathered an advisor board consisting of 100 women and involved them in the creation process, in both opinion polls and experiments. Right now, LifeSense’s product Carin is an international success. LifeSense’s goal for this year it to be the fastest growing medical company in Europe. Now that’s a goal.
What got to me was the inventive way of using different forms of research in their quest to create their first product. In innovation processes, we usually run into companies that mostly use ‘questionnaires’ and ‘expert interviews’ as part of their ‘research process’. Sometimes, if engineers or psychologists are involved, they use experiments too. Not surprisingly, they found it very hard to get to the real innovation challenge or problem in the market by using these research methods.
Over the years, many different works have been published that deal with creative research methods: there are so many great alternatives for finding that real gap in the market and iterating your product to its final stage. I decided to create an infographic with 50 different research methods. To get to this list I used the following sources:
In order to categorise the different research methods, I combined a few sources to create a general ‘research process’. On average we could state that each R&D-trajectory consists of the following steps:
Moreover, based on the Research Toolkit from the Methods Lab, I distinguished four different parameters for each research method:
. Based on these parameters, you, as an innovation researcher, could make a elaborated choice on which method to use and why.
The following research methods are part of the infographic:
Many of our students work on innovation projects for SME. When asked to organize an ‘open innovation session’, students enthousiastically start to read details about open innovation, open sessions and different ways of creating an open innovation-mindset within SME. We usually point them to the excellent work of Lee et al (2010), an article that points out that SME usually prefer to be open in the exploitative stage of an innovation process (rather then the explorative stage of innovation) and that they prefer sharing risks with strong ties such as competitors, clients and suppliers.
Surprisingly, the SME owners act positive when the students introduce them to the idea of open innovation in the explorative stage, for instance by offering to organize a shared brainstorm session for them, but they close down when it actually comes to planning it. Although appreciating the idea itself, they don’t see the direct benefit for it themselves. It seems they fell prone to the prisoner’s dilemma.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a so-called non-zero-sum game, which in economic terms represents a situation in which the collaborative total gain could be larger the individual gains. Simply said: 1+1 could be more than 2. The Prisoner’s Dilemma however sketches the situation in which the individual is aware of the fact that the total gain may be larger, but still prefers their personal gain over the group gain for any number of reason. They don’t collaborate, because they think personal benefit is more important than mutual benefit. Click here for an explanation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
In business, this dilemma is very common: not collaborating gives a higher reward on the short-term. The example of our students, and many examples alike, are caused by small fallacies in our way of thinking. Fallacies that were necessary in prehistoric times and are so deeply rooted in our behaviour that we often don’t even recognize when we behave like that. But quite often, these fallacies are not very rational and certainly not effective for business. The dilemma is summarized in the quotation: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go further, go together.”
In 2012 Rolf Dobelli published his book ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly‘, which contains 98 missers in our brain when it comes to business and marketing (and innovation if you like). In the work, all of these 98 missers are linked to each other, which brought me to the idea of creating a network infographic with all 98 missers showing how they are related to each other. Below you’ll find the infographic and an explanation of a few fallacies that are most common in innovation processes.
A well-known example, the Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome is a stance adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures that avoid using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins and costs, such as royalties. It prevents companies from collaborating effectively.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy refers to the justification of increased investment of money, time, lives, etc. in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment (“sunk costs”); despite new evidence suggesting that the cost, beginning immediately, of continuing the decision outweighs the expected benefit. In open innovation projects it usually comes down to the fact that there is no clear stage-gate-model in place and a ‘go’ is given rather than a ‘no-go’ for the fact that all parties have already invested time and money in trusting each other and building the prototype.
Quite surprisingly, it is proven that the more horses draw a horsecar, the less horsepower they produce individually. Ringelman, an engineer, tested this behaviour on humans and saw that when two men have to carry a weight, they only use 93% of their effort. If 3 men carry a weight, they use only 85% and if 8 man carry a weight they only use 49% of their effort. This behaviour is present in collaborations as well: working in trusted alliance will make us ‘carry the weight’ to a lesser extend. We extend responsibility to other partners in the network for instance.
Our minds are highly associative. We even associate things that are not to be associated (also see: clustering illusion, for instance when we see certain shapes in clouds). For this reason we also use prior experiences and knowledge to present situation, causing mistakes in our thinking. Not all past experiences are representative for current situations, such as collaborations or failures on product development.
Alternative Blindness means that we systematically refuse to compare outcomes to the next best alternative. We tend to compare it to the worst alternative – to make a stronger argument for the current outcome. In collaborative production this means that alternative options, solutions, prototypes and concepts are often overseen because we ‘believe’ in the success of the current alternative.
Neomania is the irrational behaviour associated with early adaptors. Okay, we need them to test our products, but please don’t be one yourself. In innovation, neomania refers to the fact that we irrationally want to create new things, new partnerships, new trials, new tools, even though we haven’t yet brought to market the last invention. Be aware of neomaniacs in your partnership.
There is a large difference between risk and uncertainty. In Open Innovation you’ll have to deal with both. If the likelihood of a certain event to happen is known, we can take risk. If the likelihood of a certain event to happen is unknown, the outcome is uncertain. It is proven that we rather take calculated risk than follow an uncertain path, thus the term ‘ambiguity aversion’. In business there will be many occasions where we can’t calculate or take risk, because the probabilities are unknown and in those cases we have to tolerate uncertainty.
This terminology refers to the fact that we can only look at problems from our own perspective. Mark Twain once said: “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails.”. Especially within Open Innovation contexts it is necessary to accept and overcome Déformation Professionelle, by striving for a diverse, wide network.