Ciaran Black, Group Innovation Director at Coillte gave a guest lecture to the students of the IMI Diploma in Strategy and Innovation at the IMI campus on June 24th 2011.
Coillte is a highly diversified business which owns 7% of Ireland’s total land-mass which makes them the country’s biggest landowner and landlord. Apart from the forestry business, Coillte produces building products based on wood, like MDF and has developed a number of wind-farms.
Ciaran’s role involves the creation of an innovation process to manage all the phases of innovation across the company’s four divisions. The presentation revealed some very compelling insights about how companies can successfully organise for innovation, including all the phases of the innovation value chain. The Coillte model combines the rigour of a conventional stage-gate approach with flexibility to allow for some judgment and intuition around which ideas the organisation pursues.
Coillte has ambitious growth targets and believes it has the people, the ideas, the structures, the management and the processes to deliver on its targets.