More than 50 years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy captured the world’s imagination when he said, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” And thus, the term moonshot entered the lexicon as shorthand [...]
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There’s no harder job for a corporate leader than transformation. One key to success is recognizing that transforming a business involves three activities: Transforming the core business to maximize its resilience (“Transformation A”) Creating a disruptive growth engine (“Transformation B”) Building a mechanism to share capabilities between the two (“Capabilities Exchange”) Those three activities (detailed [...]
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The Fog of Innovation — that moment when you realize that the data you need to make a critical decision about an innovative idea just aren’t clear. Unfortunately, the data rarely are. For most large companies that find themselves lost in the fog, the default answer is to keep studying. After all, a risk that [...]
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When Karl Ronn recently said, “Companies that think they have an innovation problem don’t have an innovation problem. They have a leadership problem,” I listened carefully. I featured Ronn, a former P&G executive (and current executive coach and entrepreneur), in several places in The Little Black Book of Innovation, most notably for his rant against [...]
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Take a look at your innovation pipeline. Odds are it is overflowing with rich ideas brimming with growth potential… on paper at least. Look deeper. Identify the projects that are the most different and disruptive, the ones with the greatest potential to create new growth. How are they staffed? If you are like all too [...]
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At this year’s Sundance film festival, I caught the premiere of JOBS, the widely anticipated Steve Jobs biopic. Aside from the fact that Ashton Kutcher strikes an uncanny resemblance to the Apple co-founder in both looks and mannerisms, what struck me most about the film was that the primary conflict centers on “the innovator’s dilemma,” [...]
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Over the last three years I have consistently stated my belief that Asia was emerging as a global innovation powerhouse. It’s one of the primary reasons why I moved to Singapore in early 2010. In late 2011, I even wrote, “The overarching trend I continue to see is a shift in the world’s innovation energy [...]
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One question I’ve gotten about the e-book that I wrote with my colleague David Duncan, Building a Growth Factory, is where to start. The book’s central theme is that companies can improve their ability to create growth through innovation by developing four key management systems (click here for more details): a growth blueprint; production systems [...]
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Just a few weeks ago Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Co. opened the first leg of their 2012/13 M-Prize challenge: “Innovating Innovation.” The M-Prize’s overall goal is to “surface the world’s most progressive management practices and most provocative management ideas” and connect and celebrate individuals reinventing management. This particular challenge — where I’m serving [...]
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Simply asking “what job is the customer trying to get done?” can be a powerful way to enable innovation, because it forces you to go beyond superficial demographic markers that correlate with purchase and use to zero in on frustrations and desires that motivate purchase and use. Seductive simplicity hides a rich, robust set of [...]
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