🎙️ Speaker spotlight: Benjamin Jenkins, Director of Exploratory Innovation at Synthomer Most innovation portfolios are good at improving today's business. Far fewer are good at finding tomorrow's. That's Benjamin's job. As Director of Exploratory Innovation at Synthomer, he works at the very front of the pipeline, looking outward for emerging technologies and partners, and shaping the growth platforms the company will need next. He's also been on the other side, with more than 15 years taking ideas from the lab all the way to market. That long view matters at a company like Synthomer. Its specialized polymers and ingredients go into everyday products, from paints and adhesives to medical gloves, for more than 6,000 customers in over 110 countries. With that much reach, the challenge isn't finding new directions. It's choosing the right ones. On November 3, he'll bring that perspective to a candid conversation about how real portfolio decisions get made: what to fund, what to pivot, and what to stop. Swipe through to meet Benjamin, then join him and Eduarda Baptista of Brisa Group for Innovation Portfolio Management: From the Trenches. 📅 Tuesday, November 3, 3pm GMT (London) 🎟️ Free, with a Q&A. Register and send us your questions: buff.ly/bNn5ecN #InnovationManagement #InnovationPortfolio

Most ideas die alone, in a draft nobody else ever saw. The author wanted feedback. There just wasn't anywhere to get it. So the idea went in uncooked, or didn't go in at all. Either way, the version that could have been great never existed. The fix is simple — get it in front of someone before the deadline. The hard part is where. A vague idea meets a question it hadn't considered. A good idea meets someone who can sharpen it. The author sees the gap before the evaluator does. You don't have to perfect an idea in private. Challenges with feedback-based voting and communities put the right people in front of it while it's still forming. The idea gets stronger before it's submitted — not after it's rejected. Feedback stops being a verdict at the end. It becomes part of how the idea grows up. See how to improve ideas before submitting it → buff.ly/xVfXf3H

🎙️ Speaker spotlight: Eduarda Baptista, Senior Innovation Professional at Brisa Group What does innovation look like at a company that runs Portugal's main highway network? Brisa Group operates that network, along with Via Verde, the electronic toll payment system used by millions of drivers across Portugal. At Brisa, innovation can't stay on a whiteboard. Ideas have to work on real roads, for real drivers, alongside teams who keep critical infrastructure running every day. Eduarda works at the center of it all. She brings startups and strategic partners into the business and keeps track of how those initiatives are performing so the portfolio can stand up to scrutiny. On November 3, she'll bring that perspective to a candid conversation about how real portfolio decisions get made: what to fund, what to pivot, and what to stop. Swipe through to meet Eduarda, then join her and Benjamin Jenkins of Synthomer for Innovation Portfolio Management: From the Trenches. 📅 Tuesday, November 3, 3pm GMT (London) 🎟️ Free, with a Q&A. Register and send us your questions: buff.ly/nznkeyc #InnovationManagement #InnovationPortfolio #OpenInnovation

The myth: the idea is everything. A lone genius, a flash of brilliance, and the rest is just paperwork. We love that story. It's tidy, and it lets everyone off the hook. If ideas arrive by luck, no one has to build anything that makes them arrive. Here's the problem: creativity isn't a flash. It's a process, not an event — something you can get better at, not something that strikes you. And once you see it that way, the real question isn't "who's the genius" but what you build around it. The reality: creativity is the seed. Innovation is the soil. One is an attribute — an idea a person has. Everyone has them. The other is the work that turns a seed into something real — the challenge that points it somewhere, the people who add to it, the process that carries it from a slide to a shipped thing. And it's rarely a solo act. Ideas happen between people, over time — in the conversation, the constraint, the colleague who adds the thing you'd never have thought of. Stop collecting seeds. Start growing them. Read why creativity isn't innovation → buff.ly/U8l3IK1

We see the innovation success stories. We rarely see the decisions behind them. What to fund, what to pivot, what to stop — and how those calls really get made. So we’re really looking forward to Tuesday, November 3, at 3pm (London), when two innovation leaders who make these calls every day will join us to share how they do it: 🔹 Eduarda Baptista, Senior Innovation Professional at Brisa Group Eduarda works at the meeting point of startups, partners, and one of Europe's leading mobility and infrastructure groups. With nearly a decade in innovation, she drives Brisa Group's open innovation, startup collaboration, and strategic partnerships. She also owns innovation reporting, making the portfolio visible, transparent and defensible across the organization. 🔹 Benjamin Jenkins, Director of Exploratory Innovation at Synthomer Benjamin started out as a medicinal chemist and went on to spend more than 15 years leading R&D and innovation teams across FMCG and chemicals, taking ideas from early research all the way to commercial launch. Today his job is spotting what's next. He runs Synthomer's front-end innovation portfolio, scouting emerging technologies and building the company's future growth platforms. One manages a portfolio in mobility and infrastructure, the other in specialty chemicals. In a conversation hosted by Elvira Truijens, they'll cover: → How strategy and the portfolio shape each other → Why core-business improvements and new growth bets need different governance → One decision that changed their priorities and funding → What evidence they actually use to defend their calls No polished frameworks. Just a candid conversation about what worked, what didn't, and what they're still working out. It's free to attend, with a Q&A at the end. Register and send your questions to [email protected], and if you can't make it live, we'll send you the recording: buff.ly/ZpbWG8U #InnovationManagement #InnovationPortfolio #InnovationStrategy

Your challenge got exactly what it asked for. Three things go in every challenge that works: Objective, Context, Sponsor. Miss one and the ideas wobble. Here's how to use it before you launch. 1. Objective. Name the end goal in one sentence. A more connected campus? Fewer handoffs in onboarding? A packaging line that wastes less? If you can't say it plainly, neither can they. 2. Context. Attach what people need to think well — customer data, the personas, the market, the real numbers. Vrije Universiteit (VU) knew its campus felt disconnected after the pandemic, and said so. Ten weeks later: a stairwell art competition, country fairs, a recycling program. Context is the fuel, not the footnote. 3. Sponsor. Put a name and a face on it. A line from the CEO tells everyone this is real and worth their time. Most weak challenges have a great prize and none of these three. Test your next brief against it. One sentence, one folder of context, one named leader. Three boxes ticked. Then open the doors. See the three in five real challenges → buff.ly/iZEo3mg

Plenty of innovations die in the chasm — the gap between early adopters and the early majority. Same product, two completely different mindsets. The early adopter bets on the future. Show them what's possible and they lean in. They'll forgive rough edges for the thrill of being first. The early majority backs the proven. Show them the evidence and they consider it. They want it tested, supported, and already working for someone like them. So which one do you need? The early adopter wins your launch — their enthusiasm gives you momentum and a story. The early majority wins your market. They're the volume, and once they adopt, you become the default choice. The key difference: one is moved by possibility. The other moves only on evidence. Don't recycle the launch pitch for the mainstream. Switch from vision to proof. Excitement opens the door. Evidence walks you through it. See how to build the proof → buff.ly/AvSHwn0

For years we measured the wrong thing and called it progress. More submissions. More logins. More activity. The numbers climbed, the reports looked great. On the outside, it seemed like innovation was working. Then we looked closer at the companies we'd helped. The ideas pouring in were mostly about people's own day-to-day — useful to them, unrelated to where the business was actually going. Nobody had the time to respond to them all. And every idea that went unanswered taught the same quiet lesson: don't bother. We'd mistaken volume for momentum. So we changed what we paid attention to. Not how many ideas arrived but what happened to them. Ask against a real goal, so submissions point somewhere. Then discuss, vet, and test ideas — not just collect them. And recognize the contributions that moved an idea forward — not just the ones that showed up. A full inbox shouldn't be the goal. A reason to keep contributing is. See the approach we built → buff.ly/ZelVA5g

Who in your company is allowed to innovate? If the honest answer is a small team with "innovation" in their titles, ask the next one. Who actually sees the bottlenecks? Who hears the customer complaints? Who knows which process quietly wastes an hour each day? Not the people at the top. They're measured on margins and acquisition costs. So why does the decision usually sit with them? The people closest to the problem are rarely the people holding the pen. Maybe innovation isn't a department. Maybe it's a permission you've been giving to the wrong people. Rethink who innovation is for → buff.ly/PHcFDCI

If you do ONE thing to move more ideas to launch, do this: Validate before you build. Not every idea. The expensive, uncertain ones. The new app. The new service. The bet that could fail loudly. Before any of it gets built, assign a few small tasks. Build a quick business case. Sketch the prototype. Put it in front of three real customers. Run the numbers. That's the logic here: you can't eliminate risk, but you can pay a small price for it now instead of a big one later.Every assumption you test before launch is one less surprise later. The small, certain ideas? Let those go straight to implementation. They've earned it. But the big ones earn their launch by surviving a test first. Spend a little to learn. Not a lot to regret. See how to get from idea to implementation → buff.ly/e62PqiG

History proves that all Business Models have a shelf life. You can refine a candle for a hundred years. The light bulb comes from somewhere else entirely. The best teams plan for the expiry date — and refining is only one of three jobs. Innovation isn't one thing. It's three. The 3 Es Framework sorts every effort into the horizon it actually serves. The strongest companies run all three at once. Enhance. Improve what already works. Small gains, compounding. Extend. Reach into adjacent markets and models. Same or improved capability, new customer. Explore. Plant seeds for a future that isn't there yet. The data doesn't exist, so you run small experiments to build it. Don't pick one. Sort your live projects into the three columns, then look at the Explore horizon. Whatever sits there is the only future you're currently paying for. Looks thin? You've just found next quarter's decision. Enhance keeps you alive. Extend keeps you growing. Explore keeps you here in ten years. Get better. And get ready! Read the full 3 Es guide → buff.ly/3dPiybQ

Open innovation doesn't fail at the idea stage. It fails in your inbox. Someone outside of the company sends an idea. You email back asking for one revision. They reply. You email the evaluator. The evaluator emails you. You email the outsider again. Now multiply that by a few hundred ideas. That back-and-forth becomes the single biggest drain on your time. This is where the tooling matters. Instead of writing those emails one by one, you can click once, and the participant is notified of exactly where their idea stands. Needs a revision? One button, with your note attached. So hundreds of outside ideas can move through evaluation without anyone living in their inbox. The workflows are configurable with clicks, not code. So you adjust the process yourself, no IT ticket. Outsiders don't quit because their idea was rejected. They quit because they never heard back. Automate the hearing-back. Keep the crowd. See how the workflows run → buff.ly/fqvuDBa

Innovation is a trainable muscle, like any other. The old story says great innovators are born, not made — that you either have the magic people or you don't. It's a comforting story, because it makes the answer someone else's to find: hire harder, wait for budget, hope for a unicorn. The truth is more useful, and it's yours to act on. Your people aren't waiting on talent. They're waiting on reps. Why it matters: the moment you treat innovation as teachable, your job changes. You stop hunting for the few who already get it and start developing everyone. The capability spreads. It stops living in a few heads and becomes something the organisation owns. So onboard new members with real challenges, not a tour of the tool. Run sessions on framing problems and testing assumptions. Let them learn by doing. Treat innovation as a practice, not a personality type. Nobody is born knowing how to innovate. Everybody can be taught → buff.ly/qOYdpqZ

A great idea isn't innovation yet. It's a seed. And seeds are built to grow. What turns one into something real is everything that happens after it's written down. Most ideas die in an inbox, so the first move is visibility — put it in the shared pipeline where the whole organization can comment and add what the author missed. Ideas grow in daylight. Once it's out there, test it early. Who needs this, what would it cost, when could it ship. Not to judge it, but to find out what it needs to hold up. And then be honest about capacity. You're not short on ideas, you're rich in them. Back the few you can genuinely support now, and let the rest wait for their season. Attention is the water. The big idea is where it starts. The follow-through is where it grows. Read our take on what innovation actually means → buff.ly/QdUoEh4

You hand a promising, risky idea to a team and say, "go validate it." They open a project management tool. They set tasks, owners, deadlines, and a timeline. What they don't see is what to actually do. Which assumptions matter? What experiment tests them? How do you know when the idea has earned a yes? They're experts in their fields. They were never trained in validation. So they guess, stall, and call it a process. There's a better starting point. Instead of a blank board, give them a workflow built for the kind of idea in front of them — product, business model, new tech. The assumptions come already named. The experiments come already suggested. Run ads to a fake landing page. Ship a prototype to early adopters. The workflow tells them which test fits. A board tracks work. It can't teach you how to find out what's true. Stop handing teams a blank board. Hand them a map. Read our article on innovation lifecycle → buff.ly/A8hRf5K

Two ways to ask your company for ideas. The suggestion box. Always open. Send anything. It feels generous and democratic. The challenge. A specific problem, with context and a deadline. It feels narrow. The suggestion box wins for one thing: catching the opportunity nobody asked about. Keep one open in the background for that. The challenge wins almost everywhere else. People know what you're solving, so the ideas are relevant. They know the constraints, so the ideas are sharper. There's a deadline, so it doesn't drift into "someday". An open suggestion box asks people to guess what you want. A challenge tells them, and then they can actually help. Keep the box open for surprises. Run challenges for everything else. See how both fit a culture of innovation → buff.ly/1GV4AsX

You can't judge an idea for a new coffee flavor the way you judge an idea for a new self-driving car. But most innovation teams run both through the same checklist. Call it the one-checklist trap. Here's how to stay out of it: 1. Widen the review. Don't let a small committee gate every idea. They don't have the bandwidth or the niche expertise. Let the whole organization comment, so authors can strengthen the weak spots before a manager ever looks. 2. Filter, don't decide. Run survivors through a simple model like RICE — reach, impact, confidence, effort. It tells you where to dig, not what to conclude. 3. And the one that matters most: match the workflow to the uncertainty. Incremental ideas can move through a fixed stage-gate. Riskier ones can't, you don't yet know the stages. Those need small bets, experiments, and staggered funding. The coffee flavor gets a quick tasting. The car gets a test track. The skill was never the checklist. It was knowing which idea needed which one. Read the full guide → buff.ly/8z4C1Fk

"We have plenty of ideas." That's usually where the bad news starts. The pipeline is full, the launch list is empty, and somewhere between the two, the system leaks. A working idea system does four jobs. Collect, Improve, Choose and Move. To find your leak, run your last ten ideas through all the jobs, in order, to find where they're dying. Collecting is easy. Most systems stop there. The system is the other 3/4's. See the full model in action → buff.ly/eVSDOER

When an idea lands in your pipeline, how long before someone judges it? What do you ask? “Are you finished?” or “What do you need?” Most ideas arrive as first drafts. Gaps in the value case. A compliance snag. A weak point no one's considered yet. A rough idea and a bad idea will look identical on a scorecard. So you reject both. And one of them was going to work. One round of development before evaluation changes what the scorecard is even looking at. How many of your last rejections were really "not yet"? Read our product innovation process guide → buff.ly/qcFSrC7

Two ways to fund an idea. Upfront funding: hand over the whole budget on day one. Metered funding: release the money in slices, and only release the next slice once the idea has proven the last assumption. Upfront shines when you already know the idea works. This is about execution, not discovery. Pour it in and go. Metered shines when the idea is still full of promise waiting to be proven. Which is most of the time. The key difference: metered keeps the exciting question alive. Prove the next assumption, earn the next tranche. Every slice is confidence the team earns. It rewards momentum. Good signals unlock more money. You double down on what's working, and free up the money the moment it's better spent elsewhere. Bottom line: fund certainty in full. Fund potential in steps. Most great ideas start as potential wearing a business plan, and metered funding is how you help them grow into the real thing. Metered funding vs. funding upfront → buff.ly/zxhMy0T