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

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

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

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

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

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