Webinar: Is it time to professionalise Innovation Management?

The challenge of how Innovation Management can gain the recognition it deserves stimulated a lively discussion in our webinar “Is it time to professionalise Innovation Management”. If you missed the webinar – you can watch the presentations from our two speakers and listen to the full discussion via a podcast on Soundcloud – see the link below.

Prof Magnus Karlsson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden gave an overview of the progress that has been made towards professionalisation and also a heads up about what is happening at an international level with the new ISO standards.

Scott May, Head of MISTA at Givaudan agreed that Innovation Managers do share a body of knowledge – a requirement for professionalisation – but stressed that culture and mindset are crucial. He shared his experiences of working within an innovation ecosystem focussed on food tech and explained the concept of an Innovation ARC that provides a way to capture and maintain domain knowledge within an ecosystem and how this maintains the trajectory of innovation.

The discussion widened out to include:

• the role of the CEO in determining the culture of an organisation,
• attempts to clarify the definition of innovation,
• concerns that more standards would stifle innovation,
• the need for different capabilities and job roles at different stages in the innovation pipeline.

The conclusion was there is much to discuss and share.

Watch the presentations here

Listen to the full webinar here