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

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

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

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

Healthcare, like many other fields, is an increasingly collaborative industry, with most organizations looking outside their internal silos for new ideas, innovations, and expertise. As we’ve highlighted in other works, co-patenting—when two or more parties collaborate to obtain a patent—has risen... 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

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

During the Cold War, the Western defense research paradigm depended on two key factors: the ability of the DoD to forecast threats for decades ahead and the funds needed to match the threat analysis and turn R&D planning into functioning technologies. Much of this spending was driven by a fear of... Read More

Is disruptive innovation a waste of effort? Everyone these days feels the tug of disruption. Blockchain will revolutionize banking. Autonomous vehicles will upend transportation. Pick any industry, and you’ll find a disruptive threat somewhere on the horizon. Read More