Developing an "Innovation Co-Creation" Mindset

Next-generation innovations will predominantly emerge at the intersection of disciplines, technologies, domains, markets, and people. 21st Century Leaders need to leverage diverse competencies across the ecosystem developed by opening up innovation within the organization and taking innovation beyond its boundaries - to all stakeholders.  Innovation Co-creation is the way forward.

Innovation Co-creation is a new innovation model for tomorrow's enterprises. Innovation, the world over, is moving from being a firm-centric (all innovations come from ones own own resources) endeavor to the one centered on co-creation (leverage innovations and resources from across the ecosystem). There are a number of crucial aspects of co-creation that can accelerate innovation and generate sustainable growth.

Innovation Using The “Freemium” Business Model

A recent study by Flurry Analytics found that mobile phone games that are free to download, are actually making more money than those that charge. Rather than asking $0.99 to download a game you have never tried, these companies let you download the app for free, then entice their most avid players into paying quite a bit more than $0.99 for in-game virtual goodies like farm crops or power boosters. In June 2011, among the top 100 games in the iTunes store, free games generated almost twice as much revenue as games that charged to download.

Offering your innovative products and services for free, and charging your more committed customers for premium services, is actually a common strategy. This business model is often called “freemium,” a term coined by Jarid Lukin and popularized by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

The freemium business model works like this: Everyone gets your product or service for free, forever. But those customers who really like it, and find most value in it, will have a strong temptation to upgrade to a “premium” (paid) service which has lots of additional goodies. It is, at heart, a strategy of pricing by customer segmentation. I've developed some key considerations in developing and benefiting from the freemium model.

Leadership, It's About How you Say It

Communication is about content and delivery, fifty-fifty. But when it comes to leadership, it’s all about the delivery. Of course what you say matters, but how you say it, how you relate to folks, is what differentiates great leaders from the pack.

That means you can have innovative ideas, indeed you must, but if you can’t deliver them in a way that connects with people and relates to them in a meaningful way, you won’t get results. I've identified five things everyone can do to improve delivery so that innovative leadership becomes a reality. So, wherever you are in your journey to the top, I’m sure these 5 tips will help to improve your delivery so folks will want to be a part of whatever it is you’re doing.

Innovative Thinking- The Process and Tools

To reap the benefits of innovative thinking and apply it to a business problem, start by asking four strategic questions, What is, what if, what wows, and what works? Essentially, these are translated as:

1. Assess the marketplace, get close to consumers to understand their behavior, talk to users;
2. Brainstorm and write down hypotheses; dream up your optimal, best-case-ever outcomes to a challenge; set aside constraints and fears to loosen up creativity;
3. Cull options down to a manageable number that will “wow” the customer, combining upside value while presenting profit potential;
4. Go into the marketplace with options and test the solution, product, or service with consumers, invite customers to co-create, and integrate feedback.

I've developed a number of tools to flesh out the answers to these four key process questions. Try using these four tools as part of your innovation process:

Leadership Styles, Which One Are You?

Understanding leadership styles requires more than knowing leadership personality traits, achievements, or whether they are ‘transformational’. Modesto Maidique, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School defines a six-level typology of leadership. A review of her work provides an explanation of what organizations and employees can expect from each type of leader.

Here are her six main leadership styles:

Innovation powered by Entrepreneurship

Innovation is powered by entrepreneurial thinkers. The number of entrepreneurship courses nationally has grown from 250 in 1985 to more than 5,000. This is now the hottest degree for the ambitious with dreams of becoming billionaires before age 29. At the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, a series of conferences for aspiring young entrepreneurs, hundreds of high school and college kids were feverishly taking notes. The tour, which is only five years old, will attract an estimated 20,000 students this year. All this activity is in response to a critical innovation gap. What is the innovation gap and how can the risks associated with it be mitigated?

Crowd Sourcing Innovation

Can innovative idea generation succeed when working with collaborators? Is it better to have lots of innovative ideas to choose from, or a few of higher quality? The answer will help you decide whether you approach hundreds of idea-generators using a technique know as crowd sourcing or bring together a few brilliant minds. Innovation requires both, and here's when to use what.

Adaptive Leaders Drive Innovation Via Failure Forward

Innovative leaders know how to foster innovation and tackle tough problems in an increasingly complex economy. One key to success is to embrace trial and error, develop the courage to risk and know failure–and adapt from those failures with adjustments - Accept Risk of Failure.

Innovative leaders face some challenges in large organizations. Big companies offer an attractive machine for carrying out correct decisions, the power of a team all pulling in the same direction, and clear responsibilities producing a proper flow of information up and down the chain of command. But, every one of these assets can become a liability…the big picture can become a self-deluding propaganda poster, the unified team retreats into group think, and the chain of command becomes a hierarchy of wastebaskets, perfectly evolved to prevent feedback from reaching the top.”

Adaptive and innovative leadership focuses on accepting and tolerating failure. Here are three tips toward adaptive and innovative leadership: