Why the Future of Innovation is Open

As outlined in my previous post, sustainable innovation requires evolution and revolution. Over the long term, organizations need to be capable of both moving along existing growth trajectories and creating new ones when the old business matures or stalls. This can be depicted as recurring movement along innovation s-curves. In the case of a new […]

What is Innovation?

People often think it’s weird when they hear that I study innovation – even people in very innovative jobs.  The biggest reason for this is mistaking invention for innovation.  If you do this, then studying innovation makes no sense at all – what can you learn about the flash of insight, the stroke of genius, […]

Why Lean Startups Turn Into Innovative Firms

One of the exciting trends in innovation right now is the lean startup idea.  The basic premise is that when ventures are starting out, building a scalable business model needs to be a top priority.  People like Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya and Alex Osterwalder are all doing great work in this area. I’m […]

Evolutionary and Revolutionary Innovation

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Triggered by a couple of recent discussions, I’ve been pondering for a while now over the question how evolution relates to revolution when it comes to innovation. In the following, I’ll try to develop my view on this. Let’s define  evolution as continuous and incremental innovations of a firm’s existing […]