The FEI Honors event celebrated the accomplishments of a distinguished roster of innovators in business and academia, including Linda Hill, Rita McGrath, Michael Tushman, Panos Panay, Steve Blank and Steve Wozniak. Just what do these innovation luminaries mean to you and the innovation community at large?
“The FEI Honors event is where we are going to recognize what we call innovation luminaries,” says Ivosevic. “These are thought leaders and authorities who actually help us get to this point, help us clarify a little bit of that fuzzy front end of innovation, brought some structure to our processes and methodologies, and showed us ways in which we can innovate. We have reached this point in the community. So now we are bringing them back, and we are asking them, in this ever-changing world of an abundance of information, AI, and the changes that we are experiencing, are there some new frameworks and thoughts from your perspective that are different today and will help us move forward from what we learned from you in the past.”
Taking a Holistic Approach to the Front-End of Innovation
All of these FEI Honors luminaries have certainly made an impact on the innovation community in some way, whether it’s through industry, business or academics. Why don’t you tell us just a little bit about your session at FEI, which also has to do with impact? In fact, it’s called “Improving Innovation Impact.”
“I’m hosting a workshop called ‘Improving Innovation Impact,’ says Ivosevic. “We all know that the front end of innovation is actually a lot of fun, very creative, we generate a lot of ideas, we cross-pollinate, we bring cross-functional teams into the process, we look at different perspectives, and we come up with different concepts and ideas. The ultimate goal is that these initiatives will lead to an outcome or successful profitable product.”
He continues, “The real question is from this front end, and focusing and having fun on the front end, how we can actually maximize the impact and how we can generate ideas that stick and that companies want to fund and take them all the way out. When we ask, what’s the percentage of our revenue that is from new products, products that came and are born through those front-end innovations, then we can proudly show stakeholders the pipeline of products.”
“In the session, we share a little bit of the process and some learnings and experiences from my personal career and some advice that I picked up along the way,” says Ivosevic. “We’ll share in this session ways to help people to think, how do we get more of those ideas to go through the pipeline all the way to the end to create a profitable product.”
Thank you for taking us through that part of the innovation journey—taking it from start to finish during that sometimes fuzzy but fun front-end of innovation.
