BLOG ON INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION

Tools and strategies to innovate, solve complex issues, and transform businesses

Predicting the ROI of Innovation
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

Predicting the ROI of Innovation

Anyone involved in corporate innovation will face the challenge of “selling innovation” to the executive team and/or the Board of Directors. The question of the return on investment (ROI) of innovation just keeps popping up. And still no one seems to have cracked it yet.

Indeed, predicting the ROI of innovation can feel like threading a needle in the dark. But while pinpoint precision is out of our grasp, could there be a way to calculate a rough order of magnitude ROI of innovation?

In this article I want to shed light on two essential frameworks and two critical data points that could transform your perspective on innovation ROI.

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What you should know about innovation’s time to impact
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

What you should know about innovation’s time to impact

When leaders turn for help on innovation, the last thing they want to hear is that transformative innovation’s time to impact is unpredictable and long. Still it is important to manage leaders’ expectations early on, if only to give transformative innovation the best chance of success.

Let me explain in this post what I believe all leaders should know about innovation’s time to impact and how to overcome the longer time to impact of transformative innovation.

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Are your leaders also ready to lead innovation?
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

Are your leaders also ready to lead innovation?

In my experience, almost all organisations assume that their existing leaders are ready to lead innovation. But that assumption is often wrong.

In this blogpost I explain how to help leaders be better prepared to lead innovation. It starts by creating time and space for leaders to reflect on innovation, and via a dialogue create the opportunity to:

  • raise their awareness on the radical difference between exploration and exploitation,

  • make explicit their role in supporting and challenging innovation teams,

  • make explicit their role in designing and nurturing an innovation ecosystem.

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The first 18 months of leading the creation of an Innovation Ecosystem
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

The first 18 months of leading the creation of an Innovation Ecosystem

What would you do if you were asked to lead the launch of the new innovation arm within a large organisation? Nick Himowicz and I interviewed Sergey Zverev who faced this exact challenge in Feb 2020.

In this blogpost we summarise Sergey's 6 priorities in his first 18 months of leading the development of an innovation ecosystem within MSD emerging markets.

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Experimentation is your path to growth!
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

Experimentation is your path to growth!

Large organisations won’t be able to tackle 21st century business challenges without a strong experimentation capability.

In this blogpost I explain why experimentation is so critical to manage the high uncertainty of new business ideas, what the iterative innovation process looks like, and how experimentation unlocks value creation in terms of new products, services and business models.

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Interview on Innovation Ecosystems
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

Interview on Innovation Ecosystems

In this interview I answer all the questions from my fellow Strategyzer Advisor Christian Doll on innovation ecosystems, a critical topic to build long-term resilience in large organisations.

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The 3 Elements of an Innovation Ecosystem
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

The 3 Elements of an Innovation Ecosystem

Developing an innovation capability within a large organization is a daunting prospect. It’s become clear in the last few years that it requires a more systemic approach.

In this post I explain the three core elements required to build an innovation ecosystem: explore portfolio + innovation programs + exploration culture.

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You can’t pick the winners at the start, in transformative innovation… and pro basketball!
Frederic Etiemble Frederic Etiemble

You can’t pick the winners at the start, in transformative innovation… and pro basketball!

The hindsight bias leads to overconfidence regarding our ability to predict the outcomes of future events. In the field of innovation, this often causes leaders to invest in the wrong ideas.

In this post I show how leaders who want transformative innovation outcomes should start by acknowledging the hindsight bias, and accept that “they can’t pick the winners at the start”.

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