INSIGHTS: The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Spring 2013 Vol. 2 Issue 2

We can’t talk about what we’re doing without talking about what you’re doing, a reflection of our “town and gown” partnership. On behalf of your university, thank you!

A few highlights of your engagement in furthering the innovation community:

OhioHealth, Nationwide, Worthington Industries, TDCI and Alliance sent teams through 6 weeks of Innovation Practice to further expand the reach of their innovation capabilities.

Resource shared trends and how they use them to drive innovation and connected Brad Wolf, who shares what it was like to develop the Nike Fuelband to our Forum and at Innovation CAMP.

Members of the innovation community from Wendy’s, Abbott, Nationwide, Resource, TDCI and Ologie joined faculty to judge 10 student teams’ ideas in the 1st annual Innovation Case Competition for Whole Vine.

GSW and Alliance sponsored innovation projects ranging from new idea generation to commercialization strategy for a new idea through Fisher’s 14-week Field Studies course.

Last, we’re happy to report that SPARK, a 3-day immersion session that pairs what happens before and after generating an idea with best in class design thinking, is now a collaboration of best practices between B school and D school expertise.

Thanks for your continued support and involvement.

Gretchen Goffe Executive Director, The Innovation Initiative

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue Columbus, OH 43210

In this Issue:

Welcome from Gretchen Goffe

Innovation Case Competition

Outreach

o Welcome TDCI

o Welcome Bethany

o Innovation Internships

o Incubator Update

Innovation Fisher

Curriculum

Research

Innovation CAMP

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210

Innovation Case Competition: Recap

On March 2, the Innovation Initiative held the first annual Innovation Case Competition here at Fisher. The competition was sponsored by OSU alumnae Peggy Furth of SonomaCeuticals and Mary Jane McFadden of McFadden, Winner, Savage, & Segerman, LLP. SonomaCeuticals is a science based food company producing products under the name WholeVine, including gluten free flours and grape seed oils from Kendall Jackson grape skins and seeds. The flour is also sold as cookies and crackers.

The Case addressed a classic challenge facing new companies of moving beyond the initial fan base and identifying how to "cross the chasm" and establish a market with the early majority. Recognizing the difficulties of getting new food products into national retailers, 10 teams of 4 MBA students each developed actionable strategies to generate $875k in sales within 12 months and set the company up for ongoing growth. Teams had to consider innovation, marketing, and logistics and show a plan that could reasonably be implemented. They identified who the WholeVine early majority audience was and developed ideas that ranged from marketing to women and moms to non-traditional approaches such as connecting with home wine sales clubs, deal of the day websites, private school lunches, charities, restaurant partners, and social media to drive awareness and sales.

Winning teams were selected after much discussion from a panel of 12 judges including WholeVine executives, faculty, and many of you, our Forum members. Thank you to all the judges who spent Saturday with our teams.

The winning teams: 1st place – Stephen Caution, Jon Koval, Eva Majzlikova, Abhay Prasanna 2nd place – Stacey Forman, Holli Jacobs, Meryl Swiatek, Neal Wagner 3rd place – Chih-Yu Han, Yi-Tsung Lee, Zedong Wu, Hong Yang Most Innovative idea – Tanya Curtin, Jonathan Giglio, Ravi Narasimhan, Krishna Sanga

The following students were recognized for their individual performances: Best Presenters – Tanya Curtin, Brian Dick, Chih-Yu Han Best Q & A – Ria Chakravorty, Arjun Sridhar, Kevin VanderMolen

INSIGHTS:

The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Vol. 2 Issue 2

Spring 2013

1st place team: Jon Koval, Abhay

Prasanna, Stephen Caution, and Eva

Majzlikova pictured with Peggy Furth

and Paul Novak of SonomaCeuticals

2nd

place team: Neal Wagner, Holli

Jacobs, Meryl Swiatek. and Stacey

Forman pictured with Peggy Furth

and Paul Novak of SonomaCeuticals

3rd

place team: Yi-Tsung Lee, Zedong

Wu, Chih-Yu Han, and Hong Yang

pictured with Peggy Furth and Paul

Novak of SonomaCeuticals

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43210

INSIGHTS:

The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Vol. 2 Issue 2

Spring 2013

Outreach

Welcome New Member!

Please join the Innovation Initiative in welcoming our newest member, TDCI. We are excited to have TDCI as a partner with the Initiative. TDCI has been providing enterprise solutions and services since 1992. They are the leading provider of configurator-based software and are ranked in the top 2% of US companies based on revenue. Their BuyDesign® software is deployed by leading companies across a wide range of industries, products, and sales environments. We are eager to work with TDCI and build our collective innovation capabilities.

Welcome New Staff! Welcome Bethany Hoover as the program assistant for the Innovation Initiative. Bethany is no stranger to the Ohio State University or Fisher. She earned her undergraduate degree in Political Science and is now working on her Masters in Human Resource Management. Her expected graduation date is Spring 2014. Bethany has been assisting in the coordination of activities for the Innovation Initiative since mid-December and has become a valuable member of the team. She loves that working at Fisher enables her to aid in the facilitation of learning for both the students and our corporate members. She is excited to be a part of the Innovation Initiative and help companies achieve top-line growth through consumer-centric product and service development. In addition to helping plan Innovation Initiative events, Bethany also coaches cheerleading and gymnastics for children 4 – 18 years of age.

Innovation Fellowships

The first year of semesters at Ohio State since the quarter to semester conversion is coming to a close in just 6 weeks. Many students are eagerly looking forward to graduation on May 5 and the commencement speaker, President Obama. Many more students will be anticipating the start of their summer internships come May. We had a number of companies offer Innovation Internships to the first year MBA students. There was much excitement generated for the internship opportunities this year through earlier recruitment and several companies deciding to do on-campus info sessions in order to create more interest. We would like to thank the following companies for opening their doors to a half dozen MBA candidates to work on and gain experience in innovation capacities and growth oriented projects: Alliance Data, Elmer’s, GSW-W, OhioHealth, Nationwide, and Resource.

Incubator Update

We have completed a landscape survey of incubator models and have found 4 main types which include private incubators, partnerships between academic institutions and corporations, strictly corporate sponsorship, and pairing startups with established companies. The services provided by incubators commonly offer office space, comprehensive business training programs, access to strategic partners, technology commercialization assistance, and access to funding. The beginnings of a framework is emerging from our initial research. We plan to conduct site visits to a handful of these incubators in order to further develop the framework. In addition, we will be attending an upcoming symposium, “Incubators: Function and Future.”

Fall 2012

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43210

INSIGHTS:

The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Vol. 2 Issue 2

Spring 2013

Innovation Fisher

Spring semester kicked off with another all-hands meeting featuring an innovative speaker. Wayne Poll, MD, is the CEO of Minimally Invasive Devices Inc. and has developed a device to aid in visualization during laparoscopic surgery. Dr. Poll shared his ongoing journey in innovation with members of Innovation Fisher in January.

During the last few months, IF members conducted site visits of local organizations. A group of students focused on innovations in healthcare by touring Dublin Methodist Hospital. Food and drink innovations were the topic of other site visits at Wendy’s, Seventh Son Brewing, and North High Brewing. Thank you to those companies who were willing to show the application of innovation to the IF members.

Several of the Innovation Fisher members participated in the first annual Innovation Case Competition and were among the top teams. These students put their innovation knowledge to work and developed several top-line growth ideas for SonomaCeuticals. Congratulations again to Stephen Caution, Jon Koval, Holli Jacobs, Neal Wagner, Meryl Swiatek, Stacey Forman, Chih-Yu Han, and Tanya Curtin.

The new executive team has been elected to serve as the leaders of Innovation Fisher for the 2013 – 2014 academic year. Congratulations to Elvira Teran, President; Jessica Reynolds, Treasurer; Meryl Swiatek, VP Marketing; Alissa Doty and Kelly Blumenschein, VPs Event Planning; Steve Werman and Andrew Gardner, VPs of Corporate Outreach. The new exec team takes over on March 22 and will have a few weeks of planning for the upcoming year prior to starting their summer internships. If you would like to be involved with Innovation Fisher either through site visits, internships, or speaking engagements, please contact Elvira at teran_6@fisher.osu.edu.

Innovation Fisher is co-hosting their annual summit, Innovation CAMP, with the Association of Marketing Professionals at Fisher on March 22. The event is from 1 – 6 pm at the Union. Tickets are still available at fishercamp2013@eventbrite.com. The afternoon will feature talks about the ideas behind Nike Fuelbands, trends and their impact on businesses, the joy of shopping, and how consumer photos are changing products and marketing.

Please visit www.innovationfisher.com for more information.

IF members visiting the Wendy’s Innovation

Center at the Dublin Headquarters.

IF President-elect Elvira Teran and outgoing

President Holli Jacobs learn about food and

drink innovations at Seventh Son Brewing.

INSIGHTS:

The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Vol. 2 Issue 2

Spring 2013

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43210

Curriculum

MBA

Innovation Practice will be taught by Professor Gretchen Goffe. The course is designed to prepare future leaders to engage and incent all employees in idea generation, see opportunity in change, and shift an organization's culture to embed innovation practice. In addition to theory, students learn application of innovation practices with the addition of a framework for commercial application, and perspectives from innovation leaders in industry on how they create value and a culture of innovation.

Teams of second year MBA students completed a highly successful Innovation Field Studies course over 14 weeks. Half of the class developed a new service idea for their sponsor company, which has been prototyped and will be presented to management for funding. The other half of the class took on the challenge of determining whether a newly developed product should go to market, and if so, what the potential is and the related strategy. We will offer Field Studies again Spring of 2014. We will be requesting projects early next Fall.

Research

Michael Leiblein is currently attending the Strategic Management Society’s special conference in Lake Geneva, “Strategizing Practices from the Outliers: Enabling ‘Big Bang’ Innovations.” The conference theme emphasizes research looking at outliers - deviant organizations that are deliberately taking a different path or working from a different set of assumptions, i.e. HCL Technologies, Mozilla, CERN, Cleveland Clinic. In addition, Michael is looking forward to visiting the ATLAS Experiment at CERN on March 21.

An article to be published in Journal of Management will review and outline whether and when investments in patents, lead time, secrecy, and other complementary assets affect the proportion of value created that flows to the innovating organization. The article is a collaboration by Sharon James, Assistant Professor at Fisher College of Business (FCOB); Michael Leiblein; and Shaohua Lu, PhD student at FCOB.

Michael Leiblein, Jackson Nickerson, Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at Washington University, and Todd Zenger, Frick Professor of Strategy at Washington University, have been awarded a 2013 GE National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM) research grant to study whether and how middle market firms differ in their ability to benefit from open innovation.

Preliminary results are expected April 30, 2013 from a research survey funded by a 2012 GE NCMM research grant and a Food Innovation Center research grant conducted by Michael Leiblein and Justin Miller, Assistant Professor at FCOB. The survey queried 1,200 C-suite executives across small-, medium-, and large-sized firms regarding how resource allocation and organization policy affects innovation.

Michael Leiblein will be serving on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science of Organizations panel in May 2013. The NSF panel brings together seven leading innovation scholars in the US to allocate NSF funds to new scientific projects.

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business 250 W Woodruff Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43210

INSIGHTS:

The Quarterly Newsletter from the Innovation Initiative

Vol. 2 Issue 2

Spring 2013