Some companies set up accelerators or incubators for small and independent start-ups. Their advantage is early access to new and unique ideas without expensive investments into internal innovation department capabilities.

For example, L'Oreal and its Founders Factory. L'Oréal provides each ...

The lab is a more-or-less autonomous business unit that can benefit from its parent company's resources, knowledge, and innovation base. Moreover, it is free from the bureaucratic ways of decision-making of many large companies.

This results in new or unique opportunities that can be explor...

To harness the existing potential of a growing start-up or emerging technology, companies can use mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to gain substantial market growth or to acquire a solution or service they were missing.

Google purchased YouTube in 2006 as one of its many acquisitions. Microso...

Innovation initiatives are spread among the whole organization. There is no central unit or formal Head of Innovations but everyone can come up with new ideas.

interesting innovation supporting tools include:

• Adobe's Kickbox Foundation, employees...

Creating a new department centralizes company-wide innovation efforts. The department collects new ideas from all employees and across hierarchies, gather ideas from outside of the company, evaluate unique ideas, execute feasibility studies, and prepare business cases.

The biggest challenge...