“Our new service tested off the charts — more than 5% of customers we surveyed said they would buy it,” one reader at a not-for-profit organization emailed me. “We launched it. The results were disappointing.” Remember, customers lie. Not maliciously, but they lie. The reader learned that lesson the hard way. For his next idea [...]
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Can Pixar make it an even dozen blockbusters in a row? With the release of Cars 2, set for this summer, new attention will be focused on how Pixar is able to pull off such an unblemished record of successful movie innovations. While many factors contribute to the successful creation of a new product, one [...]
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When AMC’s Mad Men concluded its fourth season Sunday night, I was shocked by two things – that Don Draper, the antihero of the acclaimed series, proposed marriage to his young and attractive secretary instead of the equally beautiful blonde PhD he was dating, and that, perhaps unwittingly, the partners at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce [...]
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Imagine the ubiquitous Facebook morphed with the popular Babycenter for young mothers and you’ll come up with something roughly resembling the sensational, China-based social network Babytree.com. Founded in 2007 by Allen Wang, a former employee of Procter & Gamble, Yahoo!, and Google Asia, the site has experienced bamboo-like growth over the past two years. Barely [...]
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A story last week about the Obama administration committing more than $3 billion to smart grid initiatives caught my eye. It wasn’t really an unusual story. It seems like every day features a slew of stories where leaders commit billions to new geographies, technologies, or acquisitions to demonstrate how serious they are about innovation and [...]
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A central argument of this blog is that every company must grapple with the reality that their current business model has a finite life, which means seeking reinvention and transformation. Leaders, too, need to constantly think about how they can reinvent and transform themselves. My own transformation begins this month as I transition from running [...]
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Most companies have turned from feeling paralyzed by the economic shocks of 2008 to plotting response strategies appropriate for today’s tough markets. One thing companies need to carefully consider is how to confront the new reality of increasingly value-conscious customers. For example, earlier this year Quiznos decided to create a completely new sandwich at a [...]
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This article is part of a 10-part series highlighting what companies need to do to transform uncertainty into opportunity. The full list will be posted on HarvardBusiness.org and SilverLiningPlaybook.com. 6. Does your organization match technological experiments (“can we?”) with strategic experiments (“should we?”)? No company would launch a new technology into a market without carefully [...]
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I had an interesting dialogue with an innovation practitioner in a large corporation the other day. We were talking about how the high rate of innovation failure can hamstring innovation. “The failure rate is actually irrelevant,” he said. “It’s the risk associated with those failures that gets you into trouble.” In other words, failure would [...]
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Any time a barrier prevents consumers from satisfying an important job, the market is ripe for disruption. Consider the significant barriers keeping physicians from adopting electronic medical record (EMR) systems, or expanding on those systems they do have. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 88 percent of physicians without electronic [...]
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