Wellspring Blog

In recent years, the position of Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) has gone from a footnoted curiosity to a mainstream trend. And now we have data-driven evidence that CINOs play an important role in driving growth for their companies. In Wellspring’s 2021 R&D and Innovation Agenda report, the... Read More

For decades, everyone has called innovation the “fuzzy front end.” On everything from Advanced R&D to Corporate Ventures, program-level investment decisions have largely been driven by leadership intuition. Either you believe in the premise, or you don’t. If that sounds familiar, then I have news... Read More

Oftentimes in large organizations and F500 companies, innovation and R&D are treated like a shared service, with the majority of initiatives originating from outside the function. Other business units and product lines, inspired after an ideation session or hackathon, come to the innovation team... Read More

Despite grand plans for disruptive innovation and headline-grabbing announcements, plenty of organizations manage to get in their own way when it comes to innovation. Many believe they have an impressive range of innovation activities, covering the gamut from incremental (H1) to adjacent (H2) to... Read More

When I speak with R&D and innovation leaders about their key metrics, two measures rise to the top: NPV (Net Present Value) and PVI (Product Vitality Index). These are the de facto standards for assessing innovation impact. Nothing else comes close. When pressed, the very same leaders express a... Read More

A few years ago, I was involved in a two-day boardroom session at a respected company – let’s call them Acme Corporation. They’d asked for help with their innovation strategy. Read More

WITH GUEST SPEAKER Michelle Cohen Director of Innovation at CME Group The CME Group’s innovation team follows best practices that should be familiar to many corporate innovators: driving structured, collaborative, and creative thinking that creates value for their customers and the business. Along... Read More

By now, it’s a well-established fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting every aspect of society, including business. Companies are suddenly faced with a fully remote workforce, shifting corporate priorities, disrupted supply chains, and, in some industries, layoffs and dramatic drops in... Read More

In my decade-plus years working with corporate innovation leaders, I’ve seen a variety of frameworks to explain what we mean by “innovation.” The most enduring of these has been McKinsey’s Three Horizons model – although there are plenty of others. These models – powerful though they are – have... Read More

Anyone reading the typical startup-world commentary about Innovation Theater might be tempted to make one of two assumptions. First, big companies are clueless about how to innovate. Second, they must be screwing up innovation on purpose – playing a cynical game just to convince outsiders... Read More