From the bankruptcy at Borders to the further downgrading of J. C. Penney’s stock despite its high-profile re-branding efforts, retailers have been in the news a lot lately—most of it bad. But there’s some good news from one of the unlikeliest parts of the retail sector—groceries, which is known for its razor-thin profit margins. This [...]
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American efforts to jumpstart the development of a cleantech economy have not been wildly successful to date. While there have been scores of small wins and incremental advances that should probably get more notice, the primary theme has been to place big bets — bets that are starting to turn up sour. Last year got [...]
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I recently participated in a spirited panel discussion with Bruce Brown, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Technology Officer, and Erich Joachimsthaler, Vivaldi Partners’ managing director and CEO. The topic — part of a series on innovation sponsored by Singapore’s Economic Development Board and coordinated by Harvard Business Review — was “What’s the Right Entry Point for [...]
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In Facebook’s initial public offering filing, Mark Zuckerberg says his company adheres to “the hacker way.” Experiment, try a lot of new ideas, prototype them, and keep moving. It’s an ethic that the company will need more than ever when its shares are trading at a projected multiple of 25 times revenue. To meet elephantine [...]
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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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The most successful innovators are consistently portrayed as possessing a passion that borders on dogmatism. They work tirelessly to bend reality to achieve their vision, with Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” serving as the prototypical example. There’s no doubt that passion is a critical component of innovation. After all, innovation is awfully hard [...]
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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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