Creating Innovation Spaces

While there have been a large number of artificial intelligence (AI) research outputs in recent years, managers and practitioners often struggle to turn those into concrete value-adding products. One of the reasons is a lack of innovation management for AI. This chapter connects these dots and demonstrates how successful AI innovation management can be done. Key to turning AI research into concrete AI-based products is building ecosystems that are fruitful, cutting-edge and sustainable. As an outcome, readers can follow our best practices when working towards their own cutting-edge AI products, while getting the big picture of AI, its promise and contemporary challenges.

This chapter illustrates an enhanced innovation environment external to a company resulting from its strategic decision to collaborate with external parties, in this case so called lead users, as input providers. In order to focus on this subject, I will first treat theoretical and conceptual aspects before presenting my scientific study together with my research findings and my conclusions on user driven case examples.

The article describes the developmental stages of innovation management and the new implications caused by digitization. In order to delimit and position companies in the innovation ecosystem, an approach to determine meaningful company boundaries is presented. The fundamentally ambidextrous corporate structure requires methods, processes and measures with which the paradox between exploration and exploitation can be resolved and controlled. In this regard, corporate culture and communication play a decisive role for the transition towards ambidextrous innovation management.

The objective of this summary is to illustrate new and familiar aspects of the planning and implementation of living and working environments. Current studies indicate a significant correlation between individual productivity and performance and indoor climate factors. Changing circumstances other than the climate, such as new technological possibilities and social developments, have a substantial effect. I will show the economic impact of optimised indoor climate factors on the overall financial results of the company based on the book by Allen and Macomber (Healthy buildings: how indoor spaces drive performance and productivity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020). This article is of interest to users, planners and investors involved in or with influence on tasks relevant to indoor climate.

While both knowledge transfer and newsroom culture had been processed in rooms with four walls for the last two centuries, the twenty-first century and the digital revolution amplified new concepts of the “flipped classroom” and the “flipped newsroom”. Flipped rooms offer interactive experiential ecosystems where basically autonomous self-learning and independent multimedia content creation with the use of emerging technologies becomes accessible to anyone from anywhere. This chapter merges the concepts of digital tools and flipped rooms and translates them into the most relevant elements of an integrated approach to journalism and communication education where educators and students can adopt the best possible solutions out there without any potential constraints. As an outcome, readers can follow our outline and adopt an integrated approach to the “flipped newsroom” as an effective learning and working environment for digital journalists and content creators.

How can a company adapt to an ever-changing market situation and remain innovative, yet competitive? How can an organisation use the individual strengths of its employees to create innovative products and services? The focus of this article is on the fostering role of leaders in those innovation and change processes. The reason for that role is that companies are not faceless entities, but rather collections of individual people. In the first chapter, we look at the changing competitive environment. How can the leadership of a company adjust its activities on things that really matter to adapt to those changes? In the second part, we look at a possibly necessary change in the company culture to support innovation and change. Finally, the third section will highlight the need for a more transformational-oriented leadership style to provide support for those efforts.

The dominant consensus among all generations, ethnicities, geographies and professions is that it is desirable to have more innovation not less. McKinsey says executives don’t want more of science, research, operation, engineering or clever business models but more innovation, as it is critical for their business growth (McKinsey, Growth and innovation. Strategy and corporate finance, 2020). Can it be perhaps that the innovation we are after is a placeholder for unexpected, positive, surprising new improvements of how we operate today? This chapter demystifies innovation and anchors it’s core in ubiquitous business concepts accessible to everyone. It then shows how leading companies in their field apply these concepts in their daily product reality.

The chapter shows examples of innovative and digital networking possibilities in the construction sector. It answers the questions what a digital ecosystem is and how to build it. What prerequisites do companies need to create innovations in the future? How can cooperation between start-ups and established companies lead to innovations in this area? Which economic sectors are part of the construction value chain? What are digital and smart services and what benefits do they provide? The chapter describes not only current innovative digital smart services and their applications, but also which services can be expected in the future.

Corporate entrepreneurship and internal corporate venturing are considered to show a way out of incumbent corporates’ inability to innovate in unknown markets, using unknown technology or applying new business models. By implementing internal corporate venturing programs innovation spaces can be created in which employees can pursue their business ideas independently from restrictions of the corporate’s core businesses while utilizing the company’s core competencies. While the reasoning is well understood the practical implementation is difficult: processes, corporate governance, funding mechanisms and the impact on the company’s core businesses amongst others have to be considered. This chapter provides insights into the practical aspects of internal corporate venturing.

Innovation is created inside of development teams. There is no thinktank above software development teams which can give them all the guidance necessary to develop efficiently software, which meets the requirements of stakeholders. The chapter describes experience of the author creating a community of (software architecture) practice to allow development teams freedom in their technology and methodology decision without losing big picture and guidance of experienced architects. Architectural work becomes recommendation and service instead of command and control.

Digitalization is changing everything around us: the way we work, the way we socialize, the way we live. But human beings are per se lazy. We despise change, we like to continue in our tried and tested ways, but doing so, survival in this ever-changing digital world is near impossible. How can we adapt? Why are Emotional Intelligence and Change Management the key to survival? Can we do this without diversity? This chapter will show why Emotional Intelligence is the key and how it can help stay on top of digitalization and how to learn to deal with changes—not only for oneself, but also for the people around us: employees, co-workers, friends.

Have you ever considered what role professional social media could play in conjunction with your innovation? My name is Ilkay Özkisaoglu and am a community architect on LinkedIn. Building communities that drive innovation for the good of society is what made me to become active on LinkedIn. One of the most important aspects that caught my attention was the level of personal branding that was sort of completely new to me, as someone, who worked as a sales director for the past 14 years and who knew only about classic one-way advertising or how to build a corporate brand at least. This personal branding is quite an exciting tool, because it makes the person more relatable and enables a better connection to the ideal customer than a corporate brand would do. With a critical action learning approach on LinkedIn content creation I found that I am better able to address one of the major issues of any innovative undertaking, which is the implementation of the innovation on the marketplace. Why is it that I am so overly certain that innovation struggles more with the implementation rather the creative part? Through my coaching practice, being assigned by the European Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME), I noted that benficiaries’ innovative CEOs, creatively live, learn and work on their innovation, but often fail both in understanding the market developmental side and gaining track on the innovation with potential customers. Although everyone thrives for innovation, it remains a struggle to develop markets with innovations. There are a variety of reasons that I have identified in my coaching praxis why this is. Subsequently, I would like to explain the issues and show how these issues can be tackled by using professional social media, i.e. LinkedIn. What sets LinkedIn apart from classical media is the fact, that you are now able to communicate directly with your ideal Customer on business matters. Engaging through different forms of content, be it text, documents or even video resonates with your audience in an unprecedented way. Do not fall victim, though, that this is a self-entertaining medium. Using LinkedIn to its full potential requires time and effort, in both creating content and engaging with the community, but it pays of well. Actively creating content and building a niche community will generate a constant stream of warm leads for you. If you would work on your personal brand and expert status like me, you would be frequently invited to campaigns and offered speaking gigs, since the work on LinkedIn has reinforced your innovation authority in your niche sectors. LinkedIn can assist you to gain momentum with your innovation roll-out with scaling, extending and mobilizing your network. Start your LinkedIn journey, right after having completed this chapter.

In today’s manufacturing—especially in automated processes which are widespread because of economic reasons—there is a rising demand of zero waste and high quality. Often the products have to fulfil safety requirements with the effect that a lack of quality is absolutely not tolerable. At all, over changes and internationalization activities big enterprises and their products have to be completely state of the art. In complex products this demands are very difficult to satisfy and partly not realistic with classical methods of statistical process control (SPC). The following article presents SPC 4.0 with the focus on Automation at the age of industry 4.0. That means: 100% data acquisition in complex processes on any characteristics necessary, in-line-capability, data everywhere available (world-wide), reliability as well as comparability for any statistical use or in cases of obligation to provide proof. Overall, the chances and challenges of trends in digitalization are figured out.

Digital platforms have a lasting impact on the economic landscape of the twenty-first century. Whether communication, mobility, tourism or mechanical engineering, every industry bears a potential for platform business models. Nevertheless, it has become apparent that established companies often hesitate to take advantage of these opportunities and thus create space for digital giants and start-ups to enter the respective industry. In order to address digital platform business models in a targeted manner, a basic understanding of general concepts and mechanisms is required, which are outlined in this chapter.

This chapter explains the role of expatriates for innovation spaces. Special consideration therein is given to a sub-set of expatriates: expat-preneurs, an intersection of two groups: expatriates and entrepreneurs. This typically highly innovative group of individuals is analyzed from various points of view, linking this research to concepts such as entrepreneurial personality, team diversity or social capital. These concepts help explain why this ecosystem of expat-preneurs seems to be capable of producing such innovative outcomes and at the same time link to some of the challenges, expatriates in general and expat-preneurs in particular are facing. The practical implementation of such ecosystems, also referred to as innovation spaces, is described on the examples of one outstanding expat-preneur hub: Singapore. Based on this example, the importance of optimal circumstances is discussed.

Although both innovation and law are omnipresent, legal innovation research in Germany is quite new and developing. However, this discipline can expect little support from other areas of innovation research, which is why the law is dependent on itself. Law is often understood as an obstacle to innovation, which is not right. The law has a considerable responsibility towards innovation, which is based on the constitution and which serves the common welfare. One example is the German healthcare system with its new law on digitalization. On the basis of two examples the following chapter shows how law can shape external innovation and implement internal innovation.

Since 2015, we have met numerous SMEs through our “Innovation offensive for SMEs and founders”—for example, Ille Papier Service GmbH in Altenstadt with 500 employees, and Heggemann AG in Büren, which has 200. These are two highly innovative companies; both regularly develop new products and services. Ille Papier Service GmbH focuses on hygiene products (ILLE Papier Service GmbH, Einsatzgebiete [Applications], 2018), while Heggemann AG’s main business is producing parts for the aerospace industry (Heggemann, About, 2018). The objective of the “Innovation offensive” is to network enterprises—particularly SMEs—, start-ups, research institutes and multipliers, positioning them to work together on new joint projects and products. Unlike corporations, neither of the two SMEs mentioned above has a large in-house R&D department; these enterprises are dependent on collaboration to develop new products and services. The same is true for most small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Only around 80,000 people (BMBF, Bundesbericht Forschung und Innovation 2014 [Federal Report on Research and Innovation 2014], p. 99, 2014) work in research and development at SMEs (Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn, Mittelstandsdefinition des IfM [IfM definition of Mittelstand (SMEs)], 2018). These enterprises often lack financial resources and find themselves “mired” in their operative business, making it simply impossible for the typical SME to develop an in-house R&D department.

Using data to make better decisions has been a formula for success for almost two decades now. We went from business analytics to predictive analytics, Big Data and now artificial intelligence (AI). Industry experts predict that within this decade we will see the second wave of AI companies generating $13 trillion GDP growth (Ng, AI transformation playbook. How to lead your company into the AI era, 2018). This growth will be dominated by industry incumbents who understand how to innovate their business model and thus outgrow their industry rivals. Winners will build AI assets to defend against challengers while others will vanish from the market. In this article, you will learn the recipe to generate value from data and AI by combining five main ingredients. After reading you understand what AI really is and how to build an effective AI product portfolio, an engaging AI culture and organizational structure, professionally train and hire AI experts, built a hands-on data governance and a solid data and AI technology platform.

In the face of the emergent age of automation powered by artificial intelligence, organisations will be hard pressed to reconsider their often long-standing operating models while also redefining the role and value-add of their human workforce. This harbours immense opportunity, as holarchic operating models can be devised to finally unlock and leverage the creative power of an emancipated, empowered workforce towards meaningful, relevant value creation and ultimately a sustainable competitive advantage in this new context. The following chapter presents the case study of our organisation—Journey 2 Creation GmbH—which has deployed and evolved a holarchic operating model since its inception. The case will provide practitioner insights, theory and inspiration for the consideration and deployment of a holarchic operating model in other organisations.

Innovations that originate outside the corporate boundaries, increasing global competition as well as the need for corporate renewal drive the growth in collaborations of established companies with start-ups. A path to understand this collaboration is provided by Chesbrough with his findings on the open innovation phenomenon. Various types of collaboration with start-ups can be used to implement open innovation in a corporate setting. An interesting and growing topic in the intersection of open innovation and corporate entrepreneurship research is the corporate accelerator phenomenon. This publication presents an overview of this phenomenon, the current design configurations and typologies. It is intended to spark the interest of the reader in corporate accelerators and should serve as basis for the implementation in practice.

Digital transformation has been accompanying managers for a long time. Nevertheless, many of them are still not clear about how they should proceed and which path can be their own. This chapter gives a brief guide to the steps that can be taken along this path and what should be considered.

In this chapter you can look at creative spaces through the eyes of an employee. I will tell you not only what it feels like to work in an office where I can work innovatively, but also what I would like to have as an office user and what I appreciate about such spaces and cultures. On the other hand, I will take you on a short journey to understand a little bit of the contradictory measures that make me experience the office in this way.

When the word “Innovation” is used in a business context, it is quickly connected to a process; a pattern and a set of measures and activities to inject innovative approaches into a business model to boost product and service development. Such processes usually demand an ideal environment and a set of preconditions or requirements to be in place for innovation to be effective.

This chapter explores how innovation goes beyond process and space and that it becomes more of a characteristic, an attitude, a culture and almost a natural human desire. It is therefore that what we call an “innovation space,” is potentially just a minor part of the puzzle that often makes us overlook the real priorities and point of focus.

In recent years, the debate on whether artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent machines will replace humans in the workplace has changed. Instead, augmented intelligence, where human-in-the-loop becomes the integral part of AI deployment in the business processes, has taken over the discussion. Human-machine cross-augmentation is also changing the disciplines of design and innovation. Nature of problems faced by business innovators and designers require humans to transition to roles of data interpreters and insights generators. This chapter describes basic frameworks for human-computer interaction, including the process of creating balanced and enriched datasets for robust AI models’ performance, active learning environment of continuous AI improvement, and the role humans will play at full implementation of digital twins.

While a new phase of globalization is emerging at present due to enormous technological advances in digitization, a number of worldwide problems and changes are occurring virtually simultaneously, which are currently being overlaid by the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter describes these connections and developments. It then examines which innovation spaces exist in the global environment, how they are evolving, and how entrepreneurs and leaders can configure and use them.