The GIST Hub

Having recently spent a few days in Cornwall – which positions itself as a small business economy with some of the highly innovative companies – it prompted me to rethink what big businesses are actually for? Does anybody know? I’d love to find out. Most of our clients tend to be large companies and whilst

Businesses are increasingly turning to internal idea platforms to unite their people around innovation. I had only ever thought of this as a positive until I came across this thoughtful post called Are Your Social Business Systems Designed for Extraction or Contribution? CV Harquail’s key point is that social business systems are designed to extract

I chaired an open innovation session at the British Library this week and we heard a lively exchange of views and some informative presentations from Orange, Quantum Innovation, P&G and Unilever. Nice to see the latter two competitors sharing the stage. We conducted a mini-crowd sourcing exercise to find the most common barriers and create

Open innovation is growing up fast. We are noticing a trend from running below-the-radar pilot projects, to rapidly scaling open innovation to become a much more mainstream business practice. In particular, we’ve been asked to do some work recently for a number of clients on how to build global innovation ecosystems and how open innovation

For the past few months, we’ve been working with E.ON and their customers on a creative collaboration to design the next generation of energy saving products and services. We’re running a series of challenges on different themes. Members of the collaboration community can submit and discuss ideas, and vote on those they think are best.

We are pleased to announce the return of the Open Innovation Accelerator on February 1st 2012 in London. We have now run dozens of these for various organisations but it’s always really good fun to run a public session with a mix of participants from large and small companies, public and private sectors, and creative

Innovation isn’t just a ‘thing’ that can be manufactured, rather, to quote Verna Allee, it is an emergent property of networks. Therefore it makes perfect sense for any individual or organization that wants ‘more innovation’ to seek to engage or build a productive and profitable external network. Some people refer to this ‘open innovation’. The

I’m doing a research project for O’Reilly UK. O’Reilly are the publishers of Make magazine and the Makezine.com website; they’re the people behind Maker Faire and Maker Shed; and they publish great books on Arduino, circuit-bending, amateur robotics, creative hacking and related topics. They want to understand how they can better support the UK maker

When buying into in a company any investor worth their salt will undertake some investigation into the quality of the opportunity before them. They do their homework. But are they being as diligent as they could be? Stages in the due diligence process includes detailed investigation of the key areas of a business: its management

I’ve been drawn to the many tributes and obituaries of Steve Jobs in recent days, and particularly enjoyed this excellent piece from Stephen Fry, and also this interesting article which makes the case that his greatest contribution was changing Capitalism, through defying a customer-led approach: “Take the old adage that the consumer is king. In

From Buzzword to Byword There’s a new taxonomy of Crowdsourcing just been published here. Any way of helping crowdsourcing to become more than a buzzword has got to be welcomed. This taxonomy is a great step in that direction. However the practice of grouping a diverse group of web-based activities into neat boxes is not

From Buzzword to Byword There’s a new taxonomy of Crowdsourcing just been published here. Any way of helping crowdsourcing to become more than a buzzword has got to be welcomed. This taxonomy is a great step in that direction. However the practice of grouping a diverse group of web-based activities into neat boxes is not

What drives innovation? A personal vision? Of course. A new technology? Sometimes (though solutions don’t always need new technology). Recognition of a need can and should also drive it. Without a need for the innovation to address, success in the market place will be limited. In his book ‘Patent Nonsense’, Clive Anderson suggests a common

I was amazed and delighted to listen to the Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival last week, where he argued that we need to bring together the arts and sciences and reinvent the polymath, harking back to the Victorian era. You can see an edited video of

We were asked recently by a client how open innovation can support sales activities. Here are the headlines of our response. Front of mind – by engaging externally you become more visible and therefore more likely to be front of mind when people are making sales decisions. Enhancing brand image – being perceived as more

“People working in innovation often refer to “the innovation process” as if producing an innovation was just one more business process that can be engineered for maximum efficiency. This traditional approach attempts to manage innovation as a linear “stage gate” process. This is often referred to as “over the wall” – meaning I did my

One of the uncertainties that holds back collaborative innovation is ‘who owns the resulting ideas’? In our innovation workshops or crowdsourcing sites that we set up, we’ve found it helpful to build on the well-known Chatham House Rule that protects the identity of participants so they feel free to speak their minds. In a similar

Open innovation takes many forms. One of the great things about working at the coal-face of this new industry is watching it develop and mature. We are starting to see a new language develop and new methods for innovating with others. One of the under-appreciated aspects of open innovation is how flexible the business model

Open innovation takes many forms. One of the great things about working at the coal-face of this new industry is watching it develop and mature. We are starting to see a new language develop and new methods for innovating with others. One of the under-appreciated aspects of open innovation is how flexible the business model