Innovation & Digital Transformation Briefs

Culture of innovation is a powerful driving force for corporations. The bigger picture, however, is that when the culture of innovation is measured consistently with other descriptive attributes, the results can reliably predict the cash flow multiple. The clear implications are that managers who need to justify and provide accountability for their budgets have a new tool to measure, value, and manage return on investment for intangible assets.

Goodwill on the balance sheet isn’t good enough. Until a better, more transparent accounting, or fair value method replaces goodwill, intangible assets will remain impossible to manage and unaccountable to shareholders. Not providing transparency will have consequences such as significant write-downs ($15 billion write-down for the acquisition of Kraft) of brands and restatements of financial reports.

This year’s C-Suite Challenge painted a clear picture of how corporations’ most senior executives see the future, and what priorities and interventions are required to succeed in it. We have been looking at the insights through an Innovation & Productivity lens to help Innovation leaders best influence the priorities and efforts ahead.

"Save the web: technology should serve humanity, not undermine its core values and institutions" is just one of John Metselaar's takeaways from this year's Lisbon Web Summit. As more than half the world's population becomes digitally connected, industry, governments, citizens and academia need to work together to keep the "digital peace."

Despite not understanding how Silicon Valley works, hundreds of corporations have started Silicon Valley innovation labs because they know that digitization is rapidly changing everything, and their corporate cultures are too siloed, insular, slow to accept, slow to use, and slow to commercialize the innovation they desperately need to survive.

An organization’s culture of innovation can be a robust predictor of financial performance, which highlights the importance to companies of measuring intangible assets. With intangible assets growing exponentially as a component of enterprise value, it is unproductive to allow them to go unmanaged.

Alex Goryachev, Cisco System’s Director, Innovation Strategy and Programs, shares the most common mistakes he has seen at companies working to build a culture of innovation. The key concept tying together Goryachev’s observations: the need to focus on the people innovating, not the “innovations” themselves. Goryachev will be speaking at The Conference Board Innovation Master Class this December in Palo Alto.

At the upcoming Innovation Master Class, taking place in Palo Alto December 6-7, 2018, Maureen Rinkunas, Innovation Systems Designer, Specialty Products Division at DowDuPont will be speaking on Thinking Like a Startup – Lessons from Accelerating 100+ Companies. She will be sharing insights gained from having coached over a hundred companies at a startup accelerator, and from bringing that startup thinking to DowDupont.