#syneratio

Roy van Lith recently received his master degree in Marketing Management. “This Master Degree is definitely an addition to my college degree,” he says. “Now I have both the practical and theoretical knowledge in marketing.” To get his master degree, Roy conducted research on the willingness to pay from companies, students and academic researchers. In this Expert Story we’ll address his research, trends in marketing and his future goals.

Gathering data

A struggle for Roy during his research was gathering data. “But during my research I found out that other students struggle with the same problem: they need many participants in surveys and experiments for their research to be reliable. As well as researchers, they’re willing to pay to get the required amount of participants and for the number of questions asked in surveys,” Roy adds. “That’s where Syneratio could provide in: making it easier for students and researcher to get the number of participants needed.”

Mind the gap

“Another thing I found out through personal interviews was that there’s a gap between business and researchers,” Roy tells me. “Researchers publish for top journals because the universities demand it. It takes up to four years for their research to be published, whilst the most important results are know after a short amount of time. These results should be published earlier so companies can use them to innovate and improve products.”

“Society benefits from early access to research”

“Early and fast knowledge sharing is important. If a research is conducted on social media, we can read the results in four years. The question is: is it still relevant then?” Roy asks. “If universities are more open to Open Access, as researchers are, the research results could be implemented much earlier while they’re still relevant. If valorisation occurs earlier it helps both science and society!”

Up close & personal

There’s a change happening in the world of marketing and communication, according to Roy. “Companies realise now that mass communication doesn’t always work. They use new ways to approach their customers. With location based messages that pop-up when you’re near the store, of with personal discounts adjusted to your buying behaviour,” he explains.

“More sales thanks to effective location based messaging”

“This way, companies can constantly respond to the customer’s needs to get more sales. This new way of approaching is already booming in the United States, and in Europe it’s used more and more.” Big brands such as McDonalds and Starbucks already use location based messaging to boost sales.

Looking at the future

Jorin Aardoom was interviewed last month by the Global Innovation Magazine. This is an innovation-focused magazine where they take a look at innovators and innovative products around the globe. To keep that in mind, we are happy with this publication in this magazine with such reach around the globe. This article gives insight in our product and into the people behind our business and ideas. Global Innovation as a magazine itself was launched stating “(…) the magazine was started with a simple desire: to spread the excitement of innovation.” Syneratio was also found to spread the excitement of innovation! You can read this article for free (of course) by clicking this link:

According to several studies, between 50 to 90 per cent of new products end up being financial failures. Even truly innovative products often do not make as much money as organizations have invested in them[1]. Moreover, 90% of all companies believe that their ‘time-to-market’ is too slow with new (innovative) products [2].

Opportunities to innovate

A good reason to look for new opportunities in order to succeed instead of failure! A study by Capgemini Consulting[3] (Innovation Game) shows the rise of innovation centers all over the world. A conventional innovation center is a team of people and a physical location. The mission of innovation centers is to pioneer and test new disruptive solutions for the customers, testing new business models and technologies that advance their position in the market. Innovation centers are looking at making significant impact to the overall business and not just incremental changes. As the moment, 38% of the largest 200 companies (by revenue) have set up Innovation Centers. Silicon Valley is the most popular area for innovation centers due to the available technology companies. The main goal of an innovation center is to gain access and exposure to latest technologies (65%).

“Innovation Centers provide access to latest technologies”

Innovation centers have proved their value to many companies, for example AT&T[4]. The innovation center of AT&T has significantly cut the time from idea to launch of a new product. An intensive collaboration with startups has delivered successful solutions such as a personalized video bill service and a self-optimizing network. We are happy to see such a rise of innovation centers. It reveals the need of innovation and the need to collaborate. Innovation centers provide opportunities to startups to work actively with the company to test (startup) products. The startups also gain from mentoring and the availability of mature processes to test their innovations. Unfortunately, the study by Capgemini shows that a lot of innovation centers fail (80%-90%). It is extremely challenging to make a success of innovation centers. One of the challenges is to create a cross-functional team, of which the composition needs to be diverse. “It is about bringing the right people along the journey at the right time and having the right integrated teams that include the business working on ideas together.”

“Syneratio is the Digital Innovation Center”

At Syneratio, we believe that there is more knowledge outside of your organization than within your organization. Our platform connects organizations, managers, researchers, and students which you don’t know yet. One of our strengths is that this will occur digitally. Innovation is possible without a physical barrier due to our digital infrastructure. The advent of this kind of digital hubs will create new innovation ecosystems. It is for the traditional innovation centers to tap into a great opportunity to re-energize their innovation capability.

Sources:

[1] https://hbr.org/2003/09/innovating-for-cash

[2] Oracle, “Understanding the Best Approaches and Tools to Manage the Complexity of Innovation”, 2013

[3] http://ebooks.capgemini-consulting.com/the-innovation-game/Standalone_Infographic_Content_Innovation_Centers_main_22_7_15_v2.pdf

Dr. Dave Richards has an impressive resume: co-founder of the MIT Innovation Lab, formal Global General Manager at Nortel Networks, formal Global Director of Partnerships at Oracle, the list goes on and on. After he graduated as a psychologist from the University of Toronto, Canada, he wanted to be an academic, a professor at a university. Instead of teaching students, he is now an authority on strategic innovation, a valued writer and a frequently asked speaker at conferences and workshops.

“We learned from each other’s mistakes and this way, we saw new ways to improve innovations and their success rates”

“The founding of the Innovation Lab happened during lunch actually,” Dave tells me. At that time he worked as Global General Manager of Nortel Networks and was asked to review the budget spend on universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During a lunch with Eric von Hippel, a professor at MIT,  they came up with the idea of a lab, where people would be able to conduct research. “When we started the lab, it functioned more as a forum for bragging, telling each other how great our innovations were and how smart we are. But after a while something changed. Instead of sharing how great we were, we shared our greatest fears and failures instead of our successes,” Dave adds.  This led them to some powerful insights. “We learned from each other’s mistakes and this way, we saw new ways to improve innovations and their success rates,” he explains to me. Thanks to these insights, they were able to make the MIT Innovation Lab a multimillion dollar organisation.

Valorisation and cross functional innovation

According to Dave, valorisation is a critical aspect of research and innovation. “You have to apply insights in order to keep improving. It’s basically what we were doing in the Innovation Lab. As for valorisation: I do think we are underperforming relative to our potential. Human nature is so much greater than we experience! There are massive opportunities for improvement,” he claims.

“We are underperforming relative to our potential.”

“That’s why cross-functional innovation is vital: the best innovations happen when you have diverse groups and when they engage effectively. But then again, it’s not just about cross-functional innovation but also about open innovation: collaborating outside your own organisation and across different industries and sectors. Then you have the most potential for value creation.”

Researchers’ struggles

In his book ‘The Seven Sins of Innovation’ Dave provides a practical approach to improve innovation. “I’ve always wanted to share some key insights from the MIT innovation Lab, but the challenge was finding the time to do it,” he says on the subject. His book provides a new definition of innovation. “In my opinion,” Dave explains, “innovation means creating more value than you have to invest to create it.”

“Researchers struggle in communicating and relationships with others”