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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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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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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The other day I had coffee with a friend who was complaining about her company’s ability to innovate. “That iteration-itis post you wrote really hit home,” she said. “That’s just what my life is like. But you know, my leadership team is smart. And they’ve been hugely successful. So why are they doing things that [...]
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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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Over the last couple of weeks in Singapore I’ve wandered the halls of the regional and global headquarters of three pretty big companies with more than $150 billion in combined revenues. I figured the calamitous economic news out of the United States and Europe coupled with riots in England would result in corporate cube dwellers [...]
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I am on record of being “long” on innovation in Asia, and I continue to feel tremendous innovation energy in the region. I’ve seen fascinating developments inside both big companies and emerging startups. But observations during two recent meetings made me wonder about the degree to which Asia needs a “Woodstock moment” to realize its [...]
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June’s Harvard Business Review features a story by Procter & Gamble Chief Technology Officer Bruce Brown and me on “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate.” The article’s core message is that P&G achieved that result by approaching the creation of new growth businesses in a highly systematic way, building what Brown and I call [...]
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