Dieter Geppert is director of LG’s Technology Center Europe which has the mission to source technology partner. LG is Korea’s second largest company and one of the “Chaebols” dominating the economy. The Technology Center also channels technology proposals from European suppliers to LG.
To get Open Innovation working, it is essential to establish a trustful relationship between the partners.

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Robert Shelton from PRTM Management Consultants is a co-author of the book “Making Innovation Work”. His interest as author and consultant is to educate leaders how to improve the innovativeness of their company.
Much is known about the management of innovation. But the question why some companies lose the battle for innovation, others regain their innovativeness is not fully understood.

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Mike Hatrick and David Wootton jointly presented Bombardier’s approach to foster innovation by initiating a major cultural change in the company. The need for change became apparent when the management of this airplane and train manufacturer analyzed the company’s future after several years of redundancy threats. The business environment seen included a difficult marketplace for airplanes after the September 11, 2001, the prospect of rising fuel prices, criticism from environmentalists on air traffic, as well as upcoming competition from low-cost suppliers. To sustain leadership, it was decided to spur innovation by a corporate-wide cultural change project.

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This talk once again provided an interesting glimpse into the way a large corporation organizes Front End Innovation. At Philips, like other large technology corporations, the importance of corporate research centers is much lower now than it was some decades ago. One reason simply is that research cannot support today’s fast innovation cycles. At Philips, as presenter Simon Minderhout pointed out, in 2006 they made 54% of revenues from new products, less than two years old. In 2003, this fraction was only 25%.

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With fossil fuel consumption expected to reach its peak in the near future, large-scale innovations are needed to provide renewable energy sources. Kjell Ac Bergström provided an insider’s view how the automotive industry prepares for change. As CEO of General Motors’ European Powertrain division, he is driving the development of future motors which will rely on renewable fuel.

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Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. As author of a series of best-selling business books (“The Innovator’s Dilemma”, “The Innovator’s Solution”, “Seeing What’s Next”) he became one of the most influential scholars in innovation management.
The audience thus had high expectations on his talk. And surely, these were surpassed. As a starting point, he shared his motivation for researching innovation: Why is innovation so unreliable? Why are innovation attempts failing so often?
His answers challenge traditional management schools

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Which presenter would dare to give a talk following Clayton Christensen’s presentation? Simon Woodroffe had no problem with that, as he transformed the podium into a stage, entertaining the audience by delivering a great show. No Powerpoint, no bullet points.

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Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference-Europe 2008

Robin Spencer, a Senior Research Fellow at Pfizer Global R&D, is responsible for Idea Management and Innovation. He showed how an idea management platform can be leveraged to support a variety of tasks in the context of innovation management. This refers to – as he called it – the third question, namely : “How to organize a “pull” innovation model?”

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 Best of the Best: Learn Top Quartile Practices in the Front End
This pre-conference workshop held by Peter A. Koen provided an excellent introduction to the conference topics. Dr. Koen, a director of the Consortium for Corporate Entrepreneurship at Stevens Institue for Technology, chairs the conference advisory board. He characterized his interest in Front End Innovation as the need to find answers  to the question, why one sees so little benefits from so much literature and consulting in Innovation Management?

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Balanced Innovation Management and Its Global Implementation Within Siemens IT Solutions and Services
Michael Heiss from Siemens IT Solutions and Services shared his experience with Siemens’ comprehensive approach to Innovation Management. IM activities are part of the Portfolio Management Department, which also takes care of knowledge management. Their balanced innovation management combines top-down and bottom-up activities.

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