Wellspring Blog

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

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

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

Organizing Your Innovation Ops Laura Kusumoto, guest speaker The challenges of innovation management are familiar to most corporate innovation leaders –defining and re-defining innovation’s mission; dealing with redundant, competing, or pet projects across an organization; budgeting for the... 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

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

Maintaining an innovation network is easier said than done. With 150 scientific articles, 720 patents filed, and 80 startups founded every 30 minutes, even the most lavishly staffed innovation teams cannot parse this level of data. Read More