Wellspring Blog

The casual sports fan thinks winning is as simple as trading your team’s worst players for the league’s generational talent. Oh wow, why didn’t they think of that? The smart fan knows championship contention is built through the draft, free agency, and trades. Getting a little bit better than the team was yesterday, focusing on process over results — pick your cliché. Whatever you call it, it’s c…

Take the quiz to explore the core elements that define your enterprise’s innovation culture, uncover the components that set your approach apart, and get matched with an innovation game changer who would thrive in your unique culture of innovation.

Information without structure is a hurricane. It is random debris flying about, power lines down — there goes a cow flying by — total chaos. If the data, analysis, and feedback surrounding your innovation strategy is whirling around in turbulent circles, progress, let alone success, is extremely challenging. For today's innovation managers, organized, accessible, and accurate reporting is what ca…

In the parlance of our times, “Blockbuster is tired; Netflix is wired.” In planning your enterprise’s next three to five years and beyond, you want to be Netflix in this analogy. True, Blockbuster had its time as king of the hill — until they weren’t and eventually disappeared from existence (also see Sears, Kmart, and Toys R Us). The vast potential of artificial intelligence could make Blockbust…

One-size-fits-all is great in concept. Do you like that shirt/jacket/hat? You’re in luck, we always have your size. The underlying problem is it will probably fit like king-size sheets on a twin mattress. Similarly, when enterprises endeavor to innovate, balancing resources across cascading departments and dependencies requires oversight that feels more tailored than one-size-fits-all.

Don’t place the cart before the horse. It's one of those hokey old-timey sayings that feels like it has no place in the age of LLMs and robo-dog parkour . It’s actually quite apt considering the devotion many companies continue to carry for innovation systems that have been proven to stymie revenue growth.

Tax day is almost here in America. For most citizens, the thought elicits a groan and an eye roll. Yes, we want to square up for everything Uncle Sam provides, but at over 6,000 pages, the US tax code is what some might call a tad complex. So do yourself a favor and don’t bring similar pain to your organization’s innovation efforts.

Many organizations are questioning whether their innovation practices are truly driving results or simply perpetuating the status quo. Watch the webinar to see what Wellspring's 7th-annual corporate innovation study reveals about the practices that actually move the needle.

It’s easy to take a look in front of you and see what you see without considering ALL the underlying impacts of anything ahead. Like the infamous glacier metaphor, there’s more to any challenge ahead than meets the eye.

Game. A complete episode or period of “play” ending in a definite result. If innovation is a game, it’s a long campaign and in order to win, it takes modern strategies, technology, and innovative innovation.

Technology transfer offices aren’t asking whether modernization is necessary anymore.

Innovation isn’t an assembly line. It doesn’t move in predictable, linear increments toward immediate output. But many organizations try to manage it as if it does, measuring activity instead of outcomes, focusing on hand-offs instead of lifecycle impact. The result is a structural divide between innovation and revenue stream management that quietly limits growth.

Trying to manage innovation projects with traditional project management software is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

At the heart of every great innovation lies a hypothesis: a carefully chosen statement about how change will create value. The hypothesis expresses why you believe your innovation, or adjustment to a product or service, will make a measurable difference. It’s the driving idea that leads to testing, validation, and, ideally, results. But not all hypotheses are created equal.

Most enterprises have no shortage of innovation activity. The real challenge is ensuring it adds up to meaningful growth.

Meetings are critical to the Stage-Gate ® process. They enable stakeholders to pause throughout development and make informed investment decisions. Without these meetings, innovation devolves into an expensive, unmonitored activity where everyone simply hopes for the best outcome.

It’s a common problem in enterprise innovation: over time, incomplete projects languish in the pipeline—projects that never cross the finish line, but also never die. These “zombie projects” stay active in a companies pipeline, eating up resources, tying up triage time, and making general nuisances of themselves. And the more zombie projects you have in your pipeline, the more acceptable it becom…

Every institution is different. Some manage IP in a small office, while others join tech transfer, corporate relations, and sponsored research in one team. Not every office needs every feature or platform. And as you grow, your software grows with you. Supplementing your central database with spreadsheets and home-grown databases only increases the risk of error. Your system should adapt as your …

Every institution is different. Some manage IP in a small office, while others join tech transfer, corporate relations, and sponsored research in one team. Not every office needs every feature or platform. And as you grow, your software grows with you. Supplementing your central database with spreadsheets and home-grown databases only increases the risk of error. Your system should adapt as your …