“A properly integrated business model forms the essence of a company’s competitive advantage,” my colleague Mark Johnson advises. That quote ran through my head as I watched a young man in a track suit prance around my table twirling a 10-foot noodle. I was in one of the Shanghai locations of a chain of hot [...]
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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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Who is the world’s most innovative company? The editors of Fast Company say Nike. Last year, number crunchers at Forbes found that Salesforce.com is the company with the highest “Innovation Premium” baked into its stock price. MIT Technology Review didn’t pick a winner, but on its recent list of top 50 “disruptors,” the magazine mixed [...]
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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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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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The walled garden protecting Apple is slowly crumbling. Faced with tightening margins and eroding market share, one of the world’s biggest companies by market value is considering introducing a low-priced iPhone. The move would be aimed at capturing consumers typically overshot by Apple’s current pricey offering, especially users in emerging economies. While perhaps diluting its [...]
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The other week I met with the leader of a new growth business for a large Asian company. The meeting was miles away from the corporate headquarters. The leader proudly showed me around her office, pointing out how the open, energetic feel compared to the closed-door, corporate nature of headquarters. The young staff certainly seemed [...]
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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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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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