TEI 006: Studies In Organizational and Open Innovation – with Karla Phlypo, PhD

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you another episode of The Everyday Innovator.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

Our Guest:  Karla Phlypo is an avid dreamer, builder, artist, and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. combining research in social innovation, knowledge management, and decision science. Her background is in automotive product engineering. Although she has many interests, the common thread is contributing to a culture of sharing and innovation through collaboration.

Highlights from the discussion include:

• Karla studied how people participate in innovation environments (open, crowdsourcing, and collaborative communities)
• Key contributors needed in innovation environments are solution providers that tend to be quiet (may not offer ideas until asked to do so), non-political, and boundary-less with a systems view
• Organizational innovation is improved by knowledge managers who aid the flow of knowledge in an organization and identification of best practices
• “Hardy perennials” are not flowers, but problems that keep showing up in product efforts that need to be pruned
• Idea management systems that collect suggestions for employees can destroy trust when they don’t understand how their ideas are used – they can be counter-productive when not managed properly