Conventional strategy theory tends to equip firms badly for 21st century competition. One of the great myths in the MBA strategy toolkit is the concept of sustainable competitive advantage that is endowed to a firm through access to a relatively unique internal resource. Most strategy textbooks talk about particular resources such as knowledge, relationships and […]
Better business models lead to better businesses. One critical part of building a better business model is getting your value proposition right. An excellent value proposition means that you have to be excellent at, well, something. But what? One framework that John uses a lot in his classes is this from The Discipline of Market […]
I was running an executive education class last week for a group of people from an engineering firm. At the course dinner, we had a speaker from a cutting edge research group within the firm who described a bunch of technology that will completely transform their industry when it hits. The reaction of the class […]
You are responsible for getting your ideas to spread. How can you do this more effectively? The first step is to connect ideas creatively – this is the fundamental creative act in innovation. Here are some thoughts on this from Noam Chomsky, discussing the role of education in an excellent post from Maria Popova: You […]
This is just off the top of my head, so I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but here are some of the jobs that I’ve had: Strawberry picker, warehouse worker in a pottery factory, church janitor, , house painter, circuit board assembler, babysitter, lawn mower, DJ, radio assistant music director, college food services worker, feed mill […]
Business school academics spend a lot of time doing statistics with the objective of trying to find the most important factors for making innovative work teams and businesses. This is hard because innovation is very rarely caused by one thing and sometimes what is causing innovation in one group will inhibit innovation in another. For […]
When I’m doing public talks, one of the big misconceptions that I have to work around is the idea that innovation is only about making new stuff – that you can only innovate if you’re making things like iPhones. Schumpeter defined innovation as the formation of new connections which drive economic growth. In The Nature […]
Innovation is an evolutionary process. Here is John explaining what that means: <p. Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea […]
There are obstacle to innovation everywhere. Risk aversion, lack of resources, lack of enthusiasm, not enough time, not enough ideas, too many ideas – the list is potentially endless. You can help your organisation be more innovative right now (today!) by answering these four questions: What is one idea that I can execute right now […]
There’s so much information around these days, how can we possibly deal with it all? Many of us are overwhelmed just by our email, so when you add in everything else (TV, books, newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.), it’s just too much. And yet, we’ve always been faced with more information than we’re capable of […]
Let’s start with a business trivia question. In 2011 the Imax Group achieved an excellent profit result that delivered an S&P industry leading return on shareholder’s equity of nearly 50% over the financial year. In number two position was business information service McGraw-Hill at 42% ROE. Can you guess what type of business came in […]
How can established organizations innovate their business model? That is the question that I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently. Two ideas collided this week that gave me some insight into the question. First, in the comments on my post about different business models leading to different outcomes, Greg Satell said: A business […]