Breaking Down Innovation Barriers
Recent report finds leading companies increasingly use hybrid innovation models to integrate insights from internal teams and external groups, including customers, business partners and competitors.
Organizations must continuously innovate if they want to remain competitive or extend their market advantage. But finding new, more effective ways to innovate is a formidable challenge.
While an organization's employees are the most valuable and accessible sources of innovation, external innovation is becoming a critical factor for driving improvements in products, business processes, and marketing methods, according to a recent survey of business and IT executives by Cognizant Business Consulting and Forbes Insights.
The report, "Innovation Beyond the Four Walls: Breaking Down Innovation Barriers," reveals that a majority of corporations are increasingly using social platforms, virtual communications, and collaboration tools to build new types of innovation ecosystems to gain insights, ideas and inspiration from both employees as well as external sources, including customers, partners, and even competitors.
The report uncovers how leading companies are expanding their external innovation networks, integrating them with their internal innovation teams, calculating return on their investments, and controlling the risks of opening proprietary information and ideas to outsiders.
Key findings include: - The use of collaboration systems for facilitating internal innovation is widespread.
- Hybrid innovation models that blend both internal and external resources are now more common than internal-only approaches to innovation.
- Hybrid teams that combine internal teams with customers are among the best performing innovation models.
- To succeed with external and hybrid innovation models, organizations must not only use good technology tools, but they must also implement effective processes, governance and infrastructure.
Find out how modern organizations are expanding their innovation ecosystems.
Download the research study:
Full report (registration required)
Executive Summary