Creating a Culture for Innovation

Creating a Culture for Innovation

Severe pressure induced by the current economic downturn pushes executives toward efforts related to cost reduction and internal restructuring. Nevertheless, innovation remains one of the high priorities on their agenda, which is mainly focused either on product/service innovation or on business process and business model innovation. Particularly in business model innovation, innovation consulting specialists see growing demand. Several of these providers, with service portfolio and go-to-market approaches focused primarily around innovation, have been evolving for some time now within the diverse corporate strategy services market. Facing more client demand, they are looking for new directions to expand their business. Chief executive officers (CEOs) and managing partners at innovation firms should embrace the notion of building their partner ecosystem, which will be the prerequisite for lasting success.


Crowdsourcing has become a media darling — which, rather paradoxically, represents a major threat to the very innovation vendors that market it. Why? Because trendiness breeds misinformation, confusion, and poorly reasoned use cases — making enterprises increasingly skeptical of crowdsourcing's value. The lesson for vendors: Honest-to-goodness customer education and business value supersede super-cool features and snazzy marketing tactics as winning market strategies. Rather than hyping it, vendors must help enterprises focus on four critical aspects of crowdsourcing — people, objectives, strategy, and technology, in that order. The heavy lifting of customer education is the only way to generate innovation value in each engagement and with it the word-of-mouth buzz that builds a strong brand and creates snowballing market share.