This year’s CORP2IN conference took place in Zagreb and put its main focus on the innovative individuals and business practices and intrapreneurship. Although we tend to connect innovations with individuals, the crucial thing is also the existance of a drive for creating structure and systems that will enable the culture of innovations because innovations won’t come if we don’t improve our education system and destigmatize the faillure.
Besides the participation in the panel discussions within the conference, Algebra had its networking and wokshop corner where people were exchanging ideas and meeting each other during the conference breaks.
Innovation on Purpose
The first conference session started with Graham Brown Martin‘s speech (Innovation catalyst, UK ) on Innovation on Purpose. Establishing purpose as the organisational North Star leads naturally to reflection on current practices, identifying what is working and then amplifying that, while considering new innovations to advance on purpose – says Mr. Brown, who works with leadership teams to design and deploy interventions that catalyse rapid idea generation, solution-focused problem solving and collaborative innovation.
Failure is crucial
PhD professor from the Faculty of Economics and business Zagreb, Mislav Ante Omazić dedicated his speech to the importance of realizing inoovations. Product innovation is one way that large corporations stay competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace, but it doesn’t always work out when big brands attempt innovation. Behind his topic “Fail to innovate and you are gone” he explained how understanding failure is crucial since so many accounts of innovation focus on the successes and so are affected by survivorship bias.
Open innovation 2.0
Mister Bror Salmelin (DG Information Society and Media, European Commission) gave us an European view on Open Innovation. He is the adviser for Innovation Systems at the European Commission, Directorate General for Communications, Network, content, and Technology where he is responsible for Open innovation 2.0 and Modern innovation systems. Want to know more about the new paradigm of Open Innovation 2.0? Watch this video: “What is the key of Open Innovation 2.0?”.
No one size fits all
Hrvoje Hadžić from the Ericsson Nikola Tesla spoke about the Innovation model that doesn’t fit all. For large companies, it isn’t about which process is right – the reality is that we probably haven’t invented the right process yet. It’s about whether the company is satisfied with the speed, quality and size of the innovations being produced. And whether the employees are applying the right customer discovery process to the right situation. No one size fits all.
Innovation network
Patrick Ferran, business development director for Nine Sigma, France spoke about the importance of networking and building worldwide business connections for tapping into a larger, global innovation network and then getting to innovation faster.
People are the key
Panel discussion about the creation of Innovation ecosystem gave us various opinions about the education system of Croatia and education in general. Together with Mario Antonić (Minpo), Tomislav Jukić (mStart), Ivica Mudrinić (HUB385) and Bror Selmelin (EK), our vice dean for international cooperation Goran Radman, noted the importance of the lifelong learning but also said how in Croatia we don’t speak publicly about the existing problems in higher education, especially universities. Institutional an curricular reform was stopped, and instead of it, government is using and with the public resources investing into a system that doesn’t function well.
Mudrinić said how the European falling behind problem in innovations happens because the biggest world companies, especially IT companies are american but Salmelin said how World economic data shows that Europe does have countries that are successful as or even more than the USA. He added how we can be better than just copying the Silicon valley’s models, if we use our own benefits – a lot of highly educated people. Mudrinić agreed how education is one of the key factors that encourage creativity and innovations.
If there exists the culture of trust and tolerance, than there will be innovations.
