A great example was given by Victor Cui, founder and CEO of One Fighting Championship  (http://www.onefc.com/).  This company promotes and covers ‘multi martial arts’ (MMA) events – a field which is the fastest growing sport in the world and which combines excitement, glamour and several thousand years of history!  Building a business in this rapidly changing and competitive space requires considerable ingenuity, experience and entrepreneurial flair – as this video interview with Victor shows.

(#HWAInspire)

Some fascinating presentations and discussions around the innovation challenges to delivering high quality healthcare across a very diverse continent, with some big implications for skills and training, workplace productivity and new models to deal with rapidly changing population structure and distribution. Some highlights were:

• Paul Redmond talking about Generation Y (and other groups like Generation X, Baby Boomers and Millenials) and how we need to rethink our approaches to this significant social group in terms of their user needs and potential as co-creators of innovation https://twitter.com/paulatliverpool

• Ian Curran talking about STeLI (Simulation and Technology-enhanced Learning Initiative) , a large-scale research programme looking at the role which simulation technologies and approaches can play in enhancing patient safety. A close collaborator with Clayton Christensen he highlighted some of the emerging challenges around disruptive innovation in healthcare and placed particular emphasis on regulation as a barrier to change

http://simulation.londondeanery.ac.uk/

• Denis Pashen and Michael Penniment giving examples of technological and organizational innovations in delivery of healthcare in remote regions, including the use of ‘Physician Assistants’ and the growing role of telemedicine.

Some of the issues were explored in more detail in ‘Masterclass’ sessions and Joanna Tait put together a Storify overview here: http://storify.com/DrJoannaT/hwa-inspire-2012-masterclasses

This is a video of an interview with Francisco Pinheiro, Strategic Innovation Manager with Atos which I managed to carry out during the ISPIM conference in Barcelona.  In particular we talk about the challenges of getting innovative ideas form employees via internal online platforms in the company.

Another fascinating mix of academic and practitioner presentations and a great city for a conference! An overview of the programme is here:

http://conference.ispim.org/index.php/home/barcelona

Highlights for me were:

Philip Cullimore from Kodak explaining how – despite the wide publicity around its problems in photographic markets – the business is still actively involved in many other areas. The case study of what could turn out to be a disruptive innovation in the printing industry was fascinating, showing how technology originally developed for making photographic film has been adapted and deployed in powerful new ways for new markets. We’re hoping to write up this case for the website – watch this space!

Tim Jones with updates from the Growth Champions research programme looking at experiences of key innovators in the public and private sector. His slides are available here:

A fascinating interview with Francisco Pinheiro of Aptos Origin about the company’s internal innovation activities and particularly the work on internal innovation platforms. I did a video interview with him about this and hope to post it on the site shortly.

In terms of videos there was a constant stream of participants into the video booth operated by Orbita97 who were asking people for their views on the future of innovation. Over 100 short clips – including contributions form Joe and myself! – are available here:

http://www.innovationfactoryinstitute.com/index.php/es/innova-reflections

And, of course, the debut of the ISPIM Band at the conference dinner, proving to the world that innovation management researchers and practitioners also have a lot of soul!

The website also offers some downloadable innovation resources in both English and German including reports on recent workshops and research projects.

http://www.pribilla-stiftung.de/eng/foundation.htm

Their most recent workshop was held in the glorious surroundings of an old Papal villa near Frascati in Italy and focused on some of the key challenges for innovation management raised by acceleration and convergence in IT. Speakers included Manfred Broy on the Technische Universitat Munich who shared a vision of highly integrated cyber –physical systems – with major implications for location, firm scale and scope and underlying issues of privacy and intellectual property management. This was echoed by Frank Piller of the University of Aachen whose description of the new industrial revolution beginning to happen around digital manufacturing was full of fascinating examples of new businesses and business models trying to move into the new space opened up by converging and increasingly simple design and manufacturing tools. The idea of being able to imagine anything and then realize it via a 3-D printer seems like the stuff of science fiction – but on sites like Shapeways.com it is increasingly becoming the reality. Frank has an excellent piece in the Sloan Management Review looking at the business models needed to work with this theme – and also has a very interesting blog in which he shares emerging insights from along this frontier.

http://www.mass-customization.de/

There is a detailed case study of this on the website and Michele has now made a video featuring interview and other detail from the research which is available here

One of the main thrusts of the AIM programme has been research on innovation and you can find not only Michelle’s video but a wide range of other useful innovation-related resources – videos, executive briefings, reports, etc. – on their website.

www.aim-research.org

Catherina van Delden, founder and CEO of a German company, Innosabi, has some pretty impressive examples of what can be done. Products co-created by a growing community include foods, cosmetics and fashion accessories – and are proving to be extremely popular when they finally hit the shelves! So much so that Catherine and her team were awarded a Ministerial prize last year for the most innovative e-business start-up in Germany. In this video interview she talks about the company – and you can find out more at their websites: www.unseraller.de  and www.innosabi.com.

One example is the legal profession –for centuries a highly regulated professional field in which change came slowly, if at all. Indeed, much of the image of law firms is about stability and consistency. But here as in so many other sectors there is change – and opportunity for those organizations which can embrace and pursue innovation. The sector is waking up to the need for change – driven partly by growing competition, partly by rising costs, partly by de-regulation. And there is plenty of activity – for example, the ‘Financial Times’ runs an annual series of awards for the most innovative law firms!

In a series of short reports (http://www.codexx.com/knowledge.php) Alastair Ross of Codexx discusses some of the ways in which legal firms have been able to take advantage of some of these opportunities in the area of process innovation.
It forms part of a larger research project which we’re involved with – and we’ll be reporting more in due course. Watch this space!

http://www.aimresearch.org/Publications/executive-briefing

Most Innovation Lab activity takes place at a country level but we try and hold an annual conference where we can share at an international level some of what so going on. This time there were around 50 delegates from 10 countries and a wide range of industrial and academic presentations. Highlights included:

• A presentation by Pedro Oliveira (MIT Sloan Management School & Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics) on ‘Users as service innovators’ which had some fascinating examples of patients and carers developing radical innovations around serious diseases

• Some insights from Jamie Wilkie about how Fuijitsu innovates its innovation process with some interesting ideas on Innovation coaches and other support roles.

• Another ‘postcard’ from the front line, this time from Ulrich Wenger (Rolls-Royce) about their experience with ‘Innovation, the arduous journey from idea to product realization’.

• Some experience with the new world of co-creation of innovation shared by Catherina Van Delden of Innosabi (see the video interview with her for more detail)

• Updates on research from Fiona Lettice (UK) and Pekka Berg (Finland)

• And – to make sure everyone kept physically and mentally moving, two interactive workshops, one on the Global Service Jam and another on masculine/feminine aspects of the innovation process!

Like all good laboratories the event provided both some new data and ideas but also raised a whole new set of questions to work on. Some of these will no doubt be reported at the next conference, scheduled for spring 2013 in Finland. Watch this space for more details!