Usually the question comes right after I tell an audience that I put former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley on my “Innovation Mount Rushmore” as a reminder of the importance of investing time and energy to understand the target market. “But how do you square that with Steve Jobs?” an intrepid audience member asks. [...]
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Apple just threw down the gauntlet to the K-12 publishing industry. In announcing iBooks 2, Apple is making a compelling case that if ever there was a time for school districts to switch from paper-based textbooks to a digital approach – it is now. Even in the absence of iBooks 2, the case was already [...]
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There’s an interesting example of Innosight’s jobs-to-be-done framework in action in February’s issue of Fast Company. It turns out that YouTube is organizing its search results around the concept. It started with an insight into customer behavior. Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube group product manager, says that the site’s top search queries are “funny videos,” “LOL,” and [...]
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2012 has not gotten off to a great start for Eastman Kodak. Three of the company’s directors quit near the end of last year, and word recently emerged that the company was on the brink of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The easy narrative is that Kodak is a classic case of a company [...]
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My last post described how Innosight follows a three-stage process to evaluate investment proposals from outside entrepreneurs. But deciding how to invest in ideas at a corporation is a different beast. In The Innovator’s Guide to Growth we suggested that companies should create one-page “Idea Resumes” that capture the essence of an idea on a [...]
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“Make sure you ask the right questions at the right time.” That’s one memorable piece of advice from a leader at a global innovation powerhouse. Unfortunately, it is a piece of advice that is heeded too infrequently inside large companies. At many companies, the idea evaluation process revolves around detailed Excel spreadsheets, comprehensive PowerPoint documents, [...]
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We entered the EMC Club at Fenway Park on a crisp December evening, about 10 minutes before the scheduled start of Innosight’s year-end party. We gaped like little kids at what John Updike memorably called a “lyrical little bandbox of a ballpark” illuminated with wreaths. Then we turned to the scoreboard and saw what seemed [...]
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I recently participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Economist Corporate Network in Singapore about innovation in Asia. I started my portion of the discussion by sharing three observations about what I had found unique about innovating in Asia: its unbelievable diversity, both between and within countries (and sometimes even cities); the historical focus [...]
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My first blog post for HBR.org went live in February 2008, when the platform was still in its infancy. Here’s what I’ve learned about market demand in three-and-a-half years and (now) 200 posts. While I thought that a reflective post might be a little self-indulgent, I think these lessons transfer to other domains, so I [...]
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Keep the faith. That’s what I said to a client who is going through a crisis of confidence. Over the summer he had put together the underpinnings of what on paper looked like a promising growth business. But — as is usually the case — the more he analyzes, the more he doubts; the more [...]
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