This week marks the release of Clayton Christensen’s highly-anticipated book, How Will You Measure Your Life (with co-authors James Allworth and Karen Dillon). The book expands on Christensen’s McKinsey-award-winning HBR article, drawing life lessons from the models that form the basis of his business-oriented writing. I first heard the germs of those ideas in late [...]
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Here’s a quick quiz for you. Is it easier to get A: 1% of a huge, established market? or B: 100% of a completely new one? If you work for Apple, you might have picked B. But too often when companies embark on innovation projects, they pick A: that is, they start by believing that [...]
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I love my three young children immensely. So it’s hard for me to be fully rational about them. Of course they are the smartest, the best looking, and the most athletic. I’m not alone — all parents are irrational. We lose sleep worrying about things we can’t control and take pride in ridiculously small achievements [...]
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One of the challenges facing market leaders is that transformational trends are only obvious when it’s too late. Typically, transformation starts in seemingly disconnected industries, or as innocent offerings targeting completely different customer segments. To spot these trends early, companies need to heed the advice of Wharton Professor George Day and long-time thought leader (and [...]
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Is there a corporate leader who doesn’t extol the virtues of innovation these days? Yet if innovation is so important, why do so many companies have so much trouble with it? The reflexive response is that it is a human capital problem — that is, that most people just don’t have what it takes to [...]
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The art and science of behavior change took center stage at this year’s TEDMED. And what a stage it was. The healthcare offshoot of the TED conference moved from its prior digs in San Diego into the elegant Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The venue helped blur the line between speaking and performance, as typified [...]
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A movement originating from the United States’ West Coast has sought to transform the creation of new businesses from an art to a science. The intellectual leader of the movement is Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who now teaches at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. One of Blank’s disciples, Eric Ries, turned [...]
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Recently, word leaked out that Intel (INTC) is evaluating whether to launch a new online television service that competes with cable. It will be a bold move for the chipmaker, which has developed a strong brand in the minds of the consumer, thanks to the long-running Intel Inside campaign. Such a radical shift into the [...]
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It’s a topic that perhaps would only appear on the pages of The Economist: an effort to establish North America’s first elephant sperm bank. As the article notes, a single elephant named Jackson has “sired many of the calves born in the United States in the past decade, and scientists say new bloodlines are needed [...]
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A workshop attendee asked me this seemingly simple question: “So, what else should I read to learn more about innovation?” It’s a hard question to answer because there is so much high-quality material out there. And specific recommendations depend on the specific topic about which you are most curious. But in thinking it through, I [...]
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