Wellspring Blog

Even just a few years ago, conventional wisdom held that “innovation” and “operations” didn’t belong in the same sentence. Performance targets ruin the creative impulse. Science needs space, time, and freedom to flourish. Innovation can never be bottled into an efficient, machine-like operation. Read More

There’s a repeated conversation that happens among corporate leaders, whispered in the halls of conferences and passed among friends like a rite of passage: “Watch out for the corporate antibodies,” goes the refrain. “They’ll kill your innovations faster than anything else.” Read More

Open innovation has hit the insurance sector, and many of the established giants are feeling the pressure. With industry giants like Nationwide, State Farm, Allstate, and AXA forming internal incubators and innovation programs to deal with the challenge from upstart competitors, the importance of... Read More

WITH GUEST SPEAKER ERIN SPRING DIRECTOR OF NEW VENTURES AT GOODYEAR Projecting the future is hard enough. You’re dealing with incomplete information, fighting multiple sources of bias, and trying to integrate a wide range of weak signals. Building the future is tougher still: tensions with the... Read More

The Economist recently published an article chronicling how Amazon leverages machine learning for competitive advantage. The biggest takeaway: it’s really about running their operations better, not a flashy attempt at inventing the future, even at a company that is nearly everyone’s poster child... Read More

There are a number of overarching trends that continue to dominate the agricultural sector. Global population growth, backlash against heavy use of synthetic crop protection, and the implementation of new IoT technologies into the agricultural technology mix are changing the landscapes innovation... Read More

A friend of mine, let’s call him Dave, is the Director of Emerging Technologies at a F500 company. The week after Thanksgiving, he told me something remarkable. Read More

For innovation teams, establishing academic partnerships is a promising investment in the future of its R&D efforts and long-term viability as an organization. As the competitive pressure increases, it becomes increasingly important for innovation teams to identify promising new technologies before... Read More

Within the innovation space, one of the key points of expansion is the application of leaps in information technology to the physical world. Just as the internet revolution brought about change by networking computers, another similar revolution seeks to bring about change by networking and... Read More

While the innovation prowess of the top-performing companies are well known, the “big business” side of the market only represents one-third of the $30 trillion dollars in private sector gross receipts. The mid-market, representing another third, is largely defined as firms with annual revenues of... Read More