How Ideas Become Innovations. A Reading Recommendation

How ideas become innovations describes HYVE's CEO Prof. Dr. Johann Füller together with my HYVE colleague Dr. Volker Bilgram (CEO Head of Innovation Research & AI) and Michael Leitl (Director Strategy at Tools of Innovators GmbH and editor at HBM) in the April issue of Harvard Business Manager. More precisely, the typical stumbling blocks of innovation and how to overcome them. Because there are enough ideas that just finding new ones is no longer the core of innovation. Transforming these into functioning products and services and making them successful - that is the supreme discipline that so many companies fail to achieve today. Big and small. Newcomers like old hands in the industry.

Radical innovations that have little in common with the original business model rarely make it to implementation. Why is that?

On the one hand, because established processes and functioning systems are not designed for change. Never change a running system; this sounds familiar to all of us! On the other hand, would you like to have radical innovations? Yes, please. But please very carefully and without affecting the core business.

Innovations fail because decision-makers prefer to think in stages and take no risks, because innovators pursue the wrong goals, classical hierarchies act too slowly, internal resources for radical innovation projects are difficult or not accessible at all, innovation-driving teams are not properly staffed and new business can rarely be integrated into the core business without friction loss (please find more detailed explanations in the article: https://www.harvardbusinessmanager.de/heft/)

The good thing is: with the right strategy, the right setting, management and handling, radical innovations also succeed. By introducing a customer lab, which acts as a customer advisory board, for instance a car manufacturer integrates existing customer segments from Germany, China and the USA into the innovation process and puts its decisions on a solid empirical basis: "The continuous feedback gives both the innovation team and the management security. It allows us to make corrections in good time and always shows us the view of the customer," says Stefano Merenda, Head of BMW Journey Management.

 If you want to read more about it, get the April issue of Harvard Business Manager or contact me.

Enjoy your reading!