Network for Innovation Expertise Development
- What is NIED?
- What does NIED do?
- How can you benefit from the NIED Innovation Management Assessment?
- Why Product and Service Innovation?
- Learn how to join NIED's Advisory Board and gain special benefits
The mission of the Network for Innovation Expertise Development (NIED, pronounced "need") is to help businesses and other organizations become expert at product and service innovation. NIED's sole focus is on the management capabilities needed to generate streams of new products and services over time within and across businesses. Innovation entails integrating technologies and other knowledge into a whole product, a whole technology platform, a whole business, a whole company and a whole ecology of enterprises. Innovation management focuses on the linkages and synergies among people, work units, knowledge systems, alliance partners, and inter-organizational associations that are necessary to create streams of new products and services. Innovation management is about creating and managing all these links.
NIED accomplishes it mission by networking in five dimensions. First, while innovation expertise is pervasive, it is not necessarily used productively. Innovation management knowledge is not delivered in a way that managers can pick up and use readily. NIED networks innovative learning techniques with innovation knowledge to deploy innovation expertise quickly, easily, and cost effectively. We develop short "expertise bursts" on key aspects of innovation management desired by member companies – for example, linking market and technology knowledge, managing radical innovations, building a technology strategy for innovation, or developing alliances. Second, we promote networking among academics and managers, and among NIED participants to share and create innovation expertise. Third, we network with innovation management centers at other of universities to pool the expertise of many academics and managers. Fourth, we network with member firms for in-depth problem-solving of specific innovation challenges. Fifth, we network with the innovation management community by identifying emerging challenges in innovation management and researching new ways to address these challenges.
How can you benefit from the NIED Innovation Management Assessment?
NIED's provides you the means of gauging your company's innovation expertise. In less than 15 minutes to complete, you will answer 40 questions about the processes and practices that have proven to make companies sustain successful innovation. From the NIED Innovation Management Assessment, you will get ratings and explanations of where your company stands relative to innovative companies. The assessment represents the accumulation of over 30 years of research into innovative and non-innovative companies. You will possess new understanding about the strength of your innovation system.
Click here to take the NIED Innovation Management Assessment!
Why Product and Service Innovation?
New products and services are the lifeblood of any organization. Technological advances, changing customer needs, and transformed markets continually render existing products and services obsolete, so businesses must innovate to stay competitive. More that 50% of sales in leading companies come from new products, and the single strongest predictor of investment value is the degree of innovativeness in the company. Innovative companies grow faster, create more jobs, generate more profits, and have more productive employees than their less innovative competitors.
Many firms struggle with becoming and staying innovative, particularly older firms in mature industries. Becoming and remaining innovative is hard! Innovation requires an approach to value creation that differs from the singular drive for short term cost cutting that is unfortunately pursued by many firms. Innovation requires an approach to organizing that also differs profoundly from command and control bureaucracies.
NIED helps managers and their organizations understand the innovative approaches to value creation and to organizing, and see how to implement these approaches. Innovative organizing is sensible, controllable, and efficient. Employees in innovative organizations have clear job responsibilities, know who their leaders are, and know how to work with others to develop and commercialize new products and services that meet customers' emerging needs. Managers in innovative organizations develop long term capabilities in technologies, manufacturing, marketing, and sales to support ongoing innovation, assure that their people work collaboratively, map out the future with competitive strategies, and make needed changes over time to keep the organization on track. NIED provides assessment tools to identify particular aspects of innovation management that a business unit or department needs to upgrade, and ways to do so.
Learn how to join NIED's Advisory Board and gain special benefits!
NIED is recruiting industry participants to our Advisory Board. How this group of leaders will gain special benefits and will help determine the activities of NIED is explained in our invitation to the Advisory Board.
