IMI Bizlab on Innovation
The IMI BizLab on Innovation is an active community of interest established to explore the challenges and opportunities for organisations seeking to compete on innovation.
In the BizLab we have designed a creative space where practitioners, in collaboration with researchers and educators, can demystify innovation and show how innovation capacity can be developed and harnessed to organisational advantage.
The BizLab is facilitated by Prof. John Bessant, IMI Research Fellow, Chair of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Exeter University, and renowned authority on innovation. The Innovation BizLab is a service for IMI Corporate Members. Dr. Deirdre Crowe, Research Officer, manages the IMI Innovation BizLab and may be contacted on (01) 207 8404
BizLab 2010:
The BizLab holds quarterly meetings around topical, participant driven themes. Our meetings this year are:
- May 25th - Sustainability & Scenario Building
- September 14th
- November 9th
The agenda for 25th May promises to be a very engaging and reflects the intrinsic link between innovation, sustainability and scenario building.
Innovation and sustainability are the two main pillars of the Government's Smart Economy. Our speakers will introduce you to creating a strategy for sustainability as well as the immense opportunities created by the green economy with case examples from experienced practitioners.
Scenario building is a powerful decision making tool enabling organisations to create alternative images of the future to guide their innovation pathway and to grasp the implications of different scenarios, including sustainability, for the organisation. Fabio Grassi, IMI Management Specialist, returns to the BizLab to engage you in a scenario building skills development workshop - the first of three planned for the BizLab this year. Book your place now This is a member service for IMI Corporate Members only.
Places are limited so please book your organisation's place by email to avoid disappointment.
Recent Events
February 9th - Ideation & Teamwork with Fabio Grassi & Gerard Harkin.
At the BizLab in November 2009 Prof. John Bessant presented the findings of the latest AIM report 'Radical Innovation: Making the Right Bets' which he co-authored with Kathrin Möslein, Anne-Katrin Neyer, Frank Piller, Bettina von Stamm.
The report available here, argues that an organisation needs a framework allowing them map out the role it believes innovation can play in helping the organisation to survive and grow, and in doing so provide a means by which the allocation of scarce resources to a portfolio of innovation projects may be assessed.
Pól Mac Aonghusa, CTO at IBM's Emerging Technology Centre also presented at the November 25th BizLab, giving a very insightful look at their strategy around identifying and pursuing successful new missions.
You can view these presentations here:
Earlier in the autumn IMI celebrated Dublin Innovation Week with this highly successful workshop led by Peter Robbins of the Innovation Foundation. Participants were taken from A to Z on an entire innovation project - from idea generation and concept development to customer testing and prototyping.
A-Z of Innovation A_to_ZPeterRobbinsOct15th09.pdf (2.21 MB, Adobe PDF)
Working in teams on real business challenges which participants are currently facing, each group worked on refining their challenge, developing consumer profiles and product/solution concepts. They then had the opportunity to test and discuss their workable prototypes with authentic end-users. The day culminated with each team pitching to Dr. Tom McCarthy, CEO of the IMI, who them gave extremely thorough feedback and valuable insights into the art of pitching their innovation and bringing it to the next stage.
To find out more about the IMI Innovation BizLab contact Dr Deirdre Crowe.
Discontinuous Innovation
Most organisations know that innovation is an imperative. Listening to feedback from customers they develop products and services and improve processes to remain competitive. They innovate. But there are two types of innovation - steady state or conventional innovation but also the more radical type of ‘discontinuous innovation’.
This was the focus of the first of four workshops held by the IMI’s Innovation Bizlab on the 28th of January last. Under the leadership of Professor John Bessant, the IMI is bringing leading Irish companies together to begin a discussion about how to manage the innovation process.
There are two ways in which organisations need to innovate. Firstly in the conventional steady-state sense but also they need to envisage a radical industry changing way, and, hopefully, to come up with one itself. This is the challenge of discontinuous innovation (DI). Being ready for discontinuous innovation requires a set of organisational skills, not least the ability to search for signs of the potential whirlwind that may sweep through an industry or, as with the internet, across entire business sectors right around the world. Organisations have to develop strategies for searching for innovation here are 12 ways in which AIM suggest companies can do this.
- Send out scouts
- Explore multiple futures
- Use the web
- Work with active users
- Deep dive One
- Probe and learn
- Mobilise the mainstream
- Corporate venturing
- Corporate entrepreneuring / intrapreneuring .
- Use brokers and
- Deliberate diversity
- Idea generators
Discontinuous innovation isn’t about the everyday, but about the occasional, and because it doesn’t happen all the time it poses a particular challenge, see it coming too late, or not at all, and a firm may end up out of business. History is clear on the matter; established firms prosper under steady state conditions but suffer when the rules of the game change.
Developing effective search approaches is only part of the solution. Firms must still deal with the problem of how to react to incoming signals which may point them in radically different directions, and require very different strategies.
The IMI BizLab on Innovation has joined the Advanced Institute Management’s (AIM) Research Discontinuous Innovation Lab. This is a European wide network of firms that link up with each other and with academic researchers to analyse the specific challenge of discontinuous innovation.
Learn more about AIM or read Search Strategies in full at www.aimresearch.org
IMI Innovation Research highlighted in The Irish Times Innovation Magazine
A Nation Seeks Employment Irish Times Innovation Magazine, March 2009. The above link will open up irishtimes.com/The Irish Times in a new window.
Ireland Inc. Innovation and Creativity in Business
Sets out to demystify innovation and show how it can be harnessed to organisational advantage. By distilling leading thinking this research paper charts an innovation road map helping practitioners identify where and how it is most relevant to and impactful on their firms in Ireland. This paper also demonstrates powerful ways in which to conceptualise and operationalise innovation and creative practice strategically.
Building on the IMI Bizlab model of solutions-driven interest groups addressing shared challenges the IMI held a very successful conference entitled Asian Innovation: Ireland’s Opportunity in January 2007.
This event interrogated what the emergence of Asian dominance of innovation in science, technology and business within the global knowledge economy means for Ireland in the critical areas of business, science and technology, and innovation and economic policy.
Asian Innovation: Ireland’s Opportunity’ was also the culmination a study of innovation in science and technology in China, India, and South Korea ‘The Atlas of Ideas’.
The IMI partnered with DEMOS the UK based think tank, and a consortium of partners drawn from government, business and academia on this 18-month project and The Atlas of Ideas: Mapping the New Geography of Science,’ was published in Ireland at this conference.
Charles Leadbeater, the project’s principal investigator presented the results of DEMOS’ findings at the Asian Innovation: Ireland’s Opportunity event.
The IMI partnered with DEMOS the UK based think tank, and a consortium of partners drawn from government, business and academia on this 18-month project and The Atlas of Ideas: Mapping the New Geography of Science,’ was published in Ireland at this conference.