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

This article was originally published on Strategic CFO 360, a Chief Executive Group community. For CFOs, one of the murkiest decisions on a quarterly—and yearly—basis is what they plan to do about their organization’s innovation investments. To really get innovation correct organizations must... Read More

Every so often we ask our community to sound off on popular topics in innovation and share their best tips, tricks, and advice in hopes that their answers may inspire others in the field. We’ve gathered these insights by email, over phone calls, at events and roundtables, and catching up with... Read More

It has been 75 years since Vannevar Bush wrote in Science: the Endless Frontier that “without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” This call-to-arms jump-started a golden age for the... 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

If you’ve read any innovation or R&D advice lately, you’ve most likely seen this common sentiment: Innovate with the customer in mind. With everyone spending more time at home these days, consumer wants and needs have shifted dramatically and continue to evolve. Personal residences have transformed... Read More

Starting with the development of a commercial polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) product in the 1980s, bioplastics have received off-and-on attention given their potential for widespread application in industry. In particular, it has long been thought that biosynthesized polymers – plastics produced... Read More