Since 2005 I have researched human behavior and labor mobility in open innovation. It is, by far, the most interesting and to my personal opinion important factor in innovation. Starting up Holst Centre as the first non-Philips resident at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, we had quite a task to fulfill growing an institute without any known employer branding.
In understanding the task at hand, I did research into the views of ‘competing’ employers, potential employees and the (blocking) factors on a macro-, meso-, micro- and nanolevel. Macro being the country level, meso the knowledge cluster, micro the organization and nano the people.
One of the greatest opportunities I found for growing Holst Centre, was the fact that we were entering a larger knowledge cluster in the Eindhoven high tech area. At this time the Brainport organization was also spun out of the City of Eindhoven. The high tech cluster, made up out of highly reputed organizations and talents, together was instrumental in attracting talent to the region. Building a constellation of high tech stars.
However, as soon as the talents landed in the region all the organizations started to behave as direct competitors, fishing in the same pond. What was completely overlooked, is the chance of bringing talents to the region for multiple career steps. Once the talents arrived, they could settle their spouse and/or family in a stable situation whilst growing their careers in the same region. So a level of open innovation in talent attraction was necessary.
What we found was that together we were able to grow the perspective of the talents, but also the dual career opportunities for the spouses. In looking at the ‘us’ in the cluster, we also experienced common ground. Building the knowledge cluster reputation was something we all contributed to. We addressed the heroism of the work being done at Holst Centre. And because it still forms a natural stepping stone between academic research at a university and the applied research done in the industry it is a good place to guide them throughout the cluster.
Knowledge clustering, especially in this day and age, is done in ecosystems on very focused areas. Organizations cannot innovate without their trusted partner network. Offering talents multiple steps among different organizations, is part of the trusted partner network.
Don’t you just love the human factor in open innovation? 🙂
Over the past 17 years we have had the privilege to work inside the innovation kitchen of many companies and governmental organizations. We have seen over hundreds of models, platforms, approaches, methods and initiatives. Many are very clever ways to help innovate or accelerate innovation but only a few turned out to be wise from an ecosystem perspective. What is wisdom when it comes to ecosystem thinking and open innovation?
Very few organizations have a formalized innovation interface to the outside world, as we explained in this blog. A formal, well defined and designed innovation interface is essential for success. Research by the European Patent Office (EPO) shows that 25% of all R&D investments in Europe is wasted on duplication or in other words wasted on reinventing the wheel. A conservative estimate of around €80 billion per annum in Europe alone is lost on research and development on already existing insights and solutions. And if that data is only limited to companies that file patents, we can only imagine the potential at governments and NGO’s. In this blog we want to share our practical experience with regard to the Networked Innovation Champions model as an example of a solid practice in open innovation.
The original Networked Innovation Champions model was developed around 2010 with AkzoNobel. The direct reason was the observation by the CTO that much work was duplicated around the globe in AkzoNobel spread-out R&D centers. When deciding the best approach to tackle this reinventing the wheel problem, the organization had the option to choose between an IT oriented approach or, as we call it, a human centric approach. By choosing this route, a unique model was developed with fabulous results.
The core of the model can be summarized by a combination of a peer-to-peer network and a so called ‘problem broadcasting model’. A group of 25 experienced R&D scientists from over 130 laboratories worldwide where selected and trained as ‘Networked Innovation Champions’ (NIC). The training and support existed of teaching these experienced researchers on the proper articulation of innovation need statements, on the process for disseminating and providing feedback on the proposed solutions for these relevant needs. The NIC-role is a formalized role. As a consequence, the NICs get time allocated to do the work and are rewarded and recognized for their work. On a tactical level, the NICs actively scouts within their organization for relevant innovation needs. Mostly triggered by the start of a new R&D project or the start of an R&D related investment like e.g. a technology development project. A great example from those early days was a need that the NIC in the R&D team in Singapore identified. The R&D group was ordering the development of a sensor by a partner that could measure certain variables in process. Through proper need articulation and exclusive distribution to the other 24 NIC’s, a solution came out of one of the other R&D teams in Europe. Apparently, the sensor had already been developed a few years back by that team and within 2 days, the team in Singapore not only had access to a solution but was also saving $400.000 in development cost and a huge amount of time. Due to the fact that only experienced R&D colleagues are selected for the NIC role and getting them connected in the training sessions, the innovation needs get identified with and matched with solution options within days.
The results are truly impressive! On average, every need that is shared within the NIC network receives around 10 answers from the other NICs. For the 130 needs that were broadcasted in the first two years of the program, over 80% were solved internally with the NICs identifying the solutions. For the remaining 20% of the needs AkzoNobel used the eternal broadcasting and scouting process.
Are you also curious if your organization is fit for a ‘Networked Innovation Champions’ model? Then have a look at our flyer for more information and reach out to us, we look forward to the conversation.
In our high tech region we are front runners when it comes to digitalization. It is in fact a whole new form of religion: honoring the god Digitalis. Digitalis is extremely demanding and asks for large sacrifices. The number of followers worldwide is larger than any other religion. Where another, reasonably well-known God, saw that all was good, Digitalis is never satisfied. But who or what is this god? In the US people introduce themselves with their pronouns: she/her or he/him or them/they. But Digitalis is, I think, an IT – which also stands for Information Technology, that cannot be a coincidence. We have created IT ourselves and need to keep feeding it, no matter how black and white Digitalis is with only binary zeros and ones. And coding has become the new monks’ task.
Also, in this religion high priests hold the power. They have temples built that makes the Vatican with all its golden splendor look like a midget. Meanwhile Digitalism has gone from a monotheistic to a polytheistic religion; where various disciples go to battle to bring their own gods Microsoft or Apple more followers. There is not one holy scripture, like the Koran or the Bible. And the Dharma, the natural order of things, is completely lost. Digitalism brings total disruption in our communities and is a concrete block on our chain. Only few people truly understand the impact of Digitalism; while it has literally reached every household since COVID. Unfortunately, we now also know that warfare has seen totally different dimensions through Digitalism. We can only hope that Karma will do her/his/their work.
Don’t get me wrong: I am most certainly not against technology. How could I be, I’ve been working in the tech sector my entire life. I see many advantages for safety, ease of use and entertainment. But humans are (sooo) much more than Artificial Intelligence can ever be. A person can marvel, be in awe, give trust and fight with passion. Have human personal interaction with each other. In my work I am often called the ‘human factor preacher’. It is the only true faith I have, the power of humans. Fortunately, there is also good news. No matter how well we can copy functionalities into digital twins, what we do not understand, we cannot reproduce. And if we don’t understand how our sub conscience works, we cannot replace human intuition. So honoring Hu-/Wo-/Manity will always be necessary – no ‘deep fake’ or ‘meta-verse’ but a poem, a deep human nano-verse. And this gospel we will keep spreading from ESTI, because the human factor is all-defining in innovative collaborations.
Innovating with partners is key when you accept that the smartest people are working outside your organization and that there are over 20 million people* working in R&D globally. The speed of technology development is faster than ever, innovations that once took years now happen in weeks, not only in the digital world, but in the physical world too. But creating value from these new opportunities and bringing them to life at a rapid pace is no easy task. It requires solving many challenges and getting the right experts collaborating with shared purpose.
Typically, organizations have two main interfaces with the outside world: sales and procurement. But in most cases organizations do not have an interface for innovation. In this post I would like to make the case for creating this deliberate interface and what the critical factors for success are to create value from innovating with partners. If a deliberate innovation interface is in place, it is often an extension of the R&D team.
Creating an innovation interface starts with an innovation strategy that integrates open innovation into the portfolio of innovation activities. Important is to define the purpose of the innovation interface; which type of innovation and what kind of partnering is envisioned and what kind of results are desirable? Will you collaborate on strategic, core technology parts of your products / solutions or more on the lesser risk peripheral parts? Are you looking for ‘components’ to integrate into your product platforms or for new product platforms entirely? What is the type of partner you are interested in and how will you manage the collaboration? At ESTI, we use our Ecosystem Game to help the innovation teams of organizations experience the dynamic of innovating with partners. Learning to walk in someone else’s shoes creates awareness of the need for reciprocity and better prepared teams.
Any collaboration with the outside world represents in reality three collaborations, an internal collaboration inside your company with alignment of all relevant functions, the internal collaboration inside the partners company and of course the actual collaboration with your partner. Using our Ecosystem Game as a basis, we created an extension of the game where also internal alignment is simulated.
Organizations do not work with organizations but rather people work with people. It is crucial to have the right people on the interface representing the organization. Innovating with partners is a capability that requires capability development. One way of developing your organization is through our innovating with partners practitioner program. This involves learning about good practices from other industries and organizations but also learning with and from your community of practitioners accelerates organizational learning.
Does your organization already have a deliberate innovation interface? How do you measure success? How do you create value? We are always happy to learn from your experience also and how we can help organizations accelerate innovation.
In this day and age, we need more and more shared forms of innovation. One of the key elements is the innovation culture that you create within your organization. Fostering the right mindsets is not just important for the employer, but just as much so for the team member. In order to find a match on mindsets you need to be each other’s career heroes, be open and transparent on what to expect on both sides of the table. It’s that femininity in culture that drives towards team and not ego, towards humanity and not economy. Of course, you need measurable goals to work towards, but it’s about how you reach those goals. Femininity is not about gender, but about Diversity, Equality and Inclusion as a whole. You need diversity in knowledge fields, religion, gender, age, nationalities and levels of education. If the cultural aspects don’t match on a personal level, it’s going to cost endless energy to work together. So BE YOUR OWN CAREER HERO, dare to make choices, be independent. With the right cultural match, you will co-create true value.
Our director Margot Nijkamp has done much research and has in-depth knowledge on how to make organizations fit for open innovation. Based on that we have created an Open Innovation Culture program, including a special diversity module. Margot writes about DEI and is a keynote speaker at many events.
More the 200 women and men already joined the Fe+male Tech Heroes movement by High Tech Campus Eindhoven to create more diversity in the tech world. Fe+male Tech Heroes is a platform and network that brings people together, creates awareness in the media and exerts a positive influence on, for example, the diversity policy of companies.
On October 12th the community came together for the Fe+male Tech Heroes Dinner Event. The theme of the evening is: The sky is the limit? The evening’s speakers have also geared their stories towards the theme. They are Oana van der Togt, Senior Business Developer Manager at the Dutch TNO research organization and member of the Council for Diversity and Inclusion at TNO, and Margot Nijkamp-Diesfeldt our co-founder of ESTI. Both women let the audience know that the sky is definitely not the limit.
Margot Nijkamp-Diesfeldt arrived at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven in 2005 without a technical background. Her husband thought she was perfect for the position of HR and Operations Director at the newly established Holst Centre. The vacancy was briefly shoved under her nose every morning. Nijkamp was determined to finish her MBA studies before she switched jobs. Nonetheless, she decided to send in her CV. Less than five hours later she received a reply: Her profile was a perfect fit. She went for an interview, became enthusiastic and made it through to the assessments. They were tough and she doubted whether the scientific world would suit her, “but I followed my intuition. She got the job and, later as director of SME relations, would remain there until the end of 2011.
EcoSystem Game During this time, she overcame two life-changing crises. “I had a ‘terminal phobia’ of public speaking,” Nijkamp confesses. “I really can’t explain to you how extreme that was.” Her boss at Holst Centre, Jo De Boeck, said: “But Margot, it’s precisely that that’s not going to help you in your career.” She did some very unique things there, De Boeck told her. He was not the one to talk about that, instead, she was. She reluctantly went in front of an audience, but on two occasions froze so badly that she was not even able to drink water. She had not slept a wink the previous nights either.
A breakthrough came when she met Carolien De Kreij-Goudriaan, who was at Kirkman Company at the time. Nijkamp was invited to speak and came up with a way to interact with her audience. She designed a game. “My passion is writing. I outlined some roles and tasks and had people play the game first. Then I explained what they had done.” Her game caught on, people got excited and of the 40, 20 of them asked her to come do the same thing at their organization as well. It was the start of what is now the EcoSystem Game.
“I had written those roles in a really fun way. With a good dose of humor. That allowed people to really experience what it is like to work on innovation at the Holst Centre. At the same time, I had been able to interact with a lot of people. That worked. Now you can put me in front of a room of 100 people and I’ll read that room in 3 minutes.”
Margot Nijkamp – Diesfeldt @ House of Yellow
Two big dreams During Fe+male Tech Heroes, Nijkamp also manages to captivate her audience with her own personal story. There’s an even more pronounced hush in the room as she talks about her second crisis to the audience. It was one she had not seen coming, she states. At the end of 2010, she was told she could expect to live only another four to six months. ” That’s a real crisis,” she recalls. That crisis led her to think about what she still wanted to do. She had two big dreams back then. “I wanted to create a start-up with zero euros and become a published author. So I started writing like crazy on my first novel.”
Under the pseudonym Emma Flogard – a Scandinavian surname that refers to keeping a watchful eye on your flow – All I’ve Got was published. Through the Holst Centre, she set up the Red BlueJay Foundation as a spin-off. What she had learned up to that point was that people are more than what they put on their CVs. In her work with the Holst Centre and others, she developed a work climate with room for the people factor, one with strong feminine cultural overtones, as Nijkamp puts it. “If that creates common ground, it creates the space to work together on innovation.” It forms the basis of the game that she developed and continued on with within Red BlueJay.
“People told me I was crazy for wanting to start a business for myself while undergoing all those grueling treatments. But for me, there was no other time to do that, it was really now or never.” In the end, the diagnosis turned out to be partly wrong and Nijkamp still has her feet firmly on the ground. She wrote another poetry (Stripe code of lashes) and her book Samenscholing Geboden appeared under her own name. “It was published even before corona turned up,” Nijkamp is quick to add.
From day to day Her foundation also continued to evolve into ESTI, EcoSystem Thinking Institute, where she works with her business partner Rick Wielens and team for clients such as the Dutch Ministry of Defence, Unilever, the Province of Gelderland and the University of Amsterdam. Things are going well for her. Even though she is in pain 24 hours a day, no one notices it about her. She is hypermobile and has Hemochromatosis, an iron overload disease. “Physically, I can’t do much. That makes me mentally inexhaustible.”
“If you had told me 35 years ago, when I was working as a secretary at Stork, that I would now be the director of a foundation and writing books, I would have laughed at you outright. I don’t have a dream of where it will all eventually lead, I live from day to day. However, each time I make a decision with my team as to whether what we do at ESTI has any social impact. Every cent we earn goes back into the foundation.”
Thank you Corine Spaans for this great recap of the Fe+male Tech Heroes Dinner Event. You can read the complete story at Innovation Origins.
In a world of increasing uncertainties, learning how to work and rely on human centric ecosystems is key.
The higher the ambiguity, the more it important it is to connect on a human level and to develop trust as a basis for collaboration. We need to transition from the dominant zero-sum-game-mindset to a mindset that reflects the reality of interdependency.
Rick Wielens introduces the why of human centric ecosystems in this short clip from our Human Centric Innovation Conference.
Learn about the challenges that working in an ecosystem entails; such as the conflicting interests and how to deal with these, the required mindsets, capability and profile selection and learnings from other organizations.
The game is played in a live (online) workshop setting; it’s interactive, highly engaging and self-learning between participants. The gamegives participants an experience while absorbing knowledge in the process. It’s seen as energetic, challenging and eye-opening – even by people who are already working in an innovation ecosystem.
Ecosystem Thinking Institute: ‘The clock-speed of innovation keeps ticking faster’
The concept of innovation has been widely discussed these days in all areas and markets. However, are companies really nourishing a breeding ground for innovative solutions? Are they truly aware of the market timing and opportunities for their novel products? How to work (and think) like an ecosystem from a demand-driven innovation perspective? Margot Nijkamp, the Ecosystem Thinking Institute’s co-founder, has the answers to all these questions and more. She talks to us about the Institute’s development and goals, their strategies during the fastidious 2020 crisis, and gives us insights into how important it is for companies to keep an eye on the outside world.
It is safe to say that Margot Nijkamp knows a thing or two about innovation. For instance, as a member of the startup team of Packard Bell EMEA, she helped bring the very first home computers to the world. In her fourth startup, she was the first non-Philips resident on the High Tech Campus when the Ministry of Economic Affairs designed a new applied knowledge institute: Holst Centre. Margot in her role of HR & Operations Director was the very first person to make quarters on HTC. “It was very challenging, and I’m very proud to have been part of it,” she describes.
The search for demand-driven innovation After a life-changing experience with a severe health condition, Margot decided to pursue her dreams – one of them being to create a startup with zero Euros. She left Holst Centre and spun out with the Red Bluejay Foundation, which began its efforts in January 2011 as a place to work with young talents on cultural elements for innovation.
As the High Tech Campus was very much interested in the project, it evolved into the Open Innovation Academy and further: “Eventually, we discussed that if we wanted to make big demand-driven innovation trajectories, we had to make sure that we promoted challenges for big corporations, for the public sector, and other fields,” Margot explains. Ultimately, this all progressed towards what now is the EcoSystem Thinking Institute, an organization that helps companies rethink their strategies through demand-driven innovation from a shared-risk, shared-result perspective.
The EcoSystem Thinking Institute ESTI is a non-profit foundation described by Margot as the new entity where all the programs, challenges, consultancy, training, and implementation efforts have come together. ESTI works towards bringing ecosystem thinking perspectives on the process steps companies need to take to achieve successful innovation with the outside world. The main idea is to help them think of how they can do demand-driven innovation. “If you do technology push, you don’t know if someone is out there waiting for your product or service. So it’s much better to start at the demand side, making sure that there is a real problem that must be addressed,” Margot claims.
The Retrofit Insulation Challenge, created for about 25 Dutch housing corporations, is an interesting example of that. Margot says that the insulation packages commonly used were about 30 centimeters thick resulting in huge integral project costs. However, by exploring and thinking together, the companies managed to find a new insulation solution, a material derived from the aviation industry, which measured a tiny fraction of that. The outcome: housing corporations did not need to change the window sills or the door frames, resulting in a much lower total cost of ownership and thus rent. “This is a compelling example of how this ecosystem thinking brings you new perspectives from cross-overs,” she reflects.
The clock-speed of innovation requires…asking the right questions ESTI’s philosophy underlines the importance of having a good problem or a good question. Something that might be absent in organizations that lack established innovation departments. “Very often, you see organizations looking for a solution – an 8×8 vehicle to overcome rugged terrain. They don’t say: ‘We need to transport something or someone from A to B.’ By not describing the effects that they want to reach, but the solution, they remove every kind of thinking on innovation,” Margot describes. Helping guide this thinking process and taking the right steps to absorb new knowledge: that is the role of ESTI. Meanwhile, the clock-speed of innovation, as Margot defines, keeps going faster. According to her, individualistic thinking, or a closed innovation culture, can be true only for organizations who think they can afford to keep it that way. Nevertheless, in the real world, if companies do not look outside, they miss the timing.
The team Margot has worked together with Rick Wielens, ESTI’s second co-founder, since 2011. As she explains, “Rick is the technology-driven and process-driven person. And I look at the human factor, the cultural elements, bringing the right diversity and mindsets. So we’re very much complementary in that aspect.” In total, ESTI’s team has around 15 people, seven of those involved in the projects regularly. Margot describes it as being “very diverse,” with people of all age groups, religions, and distinct backgrounds. “We have people coming from the corporate world; others who’ve done very in-depth landscaping into technology; we have fantastic program managers to guide the challenges. I am currently working mostly towards the public sector, education, and labor markets,” Margot declares.
What does Ecosystem Thinking mean for Sales & Buying?
Working together with the outside world substantially changes the rules of engagement – also in Sales & Buying. Let Margot Nijkamp take you through the mindset shifts that will be needed for the future.
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