There is a terrific quote in Creative Disruption by Simon Waldman about strategy. It is from Markus Reckling, the Managing Director of Corporate Development for Deutsche Post – here’s the quote plus Waldman’s interpretation: “I used to think that strategy was about avoiding unforeseen events; now I it’s about making sure you can deal with […]
Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Tim wrote a post on “Staying Innovative While Growing”. I fully concur with his conclusion: “But it’s another innovation paradox – the small firms that might be most innovative often don’t have the market clout to get their ideas to diffuse. The firms that are big enough to get ideas […]
I ran across a shocking quote today. It’s from an article in the July issue of The Monthly by Malcolm Knox called The Next Chapter – which is about the current state of play with e-books. Here is the quote: Until this year, the argument over e-books centred on whether they would ever overtake print. […]
In a series of journal articles, Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman have talked about the importance of being an ambidextrous organisation in order to succeed at innovation. To be ambidextrous, organisations have to be good at both exploration and exploitation. All this sounds a bit academic, so here it is in clearer terms (I hope!): […]
Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention: The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that […]
A while ago John and I did in-depth individual interviews with almost all of the senior managers of a firm about their innovation process. We ran into a striking paradox while doing so. One person said to us “This company needs to get rid of innovation.” He said this after he had explained all of […]
This is the latest page that we’ve added on the top menu: Engaging with people that are entrepreneurs, or involved in managing innovation is one of our top priorities. Trying to help people doing these things is one of the objectives with this blog. However, you may find that the material here isn’t specific enough […]
Here is a quick test of your organisation’s innovation program. Step 1: Think of the person in your organisation that has the most responsibility for making innovation happen. Step 2: Imagine that that person is the guy walking across the street in this video – for the purpose of illustration, we’ll call him Tom: Step […]
Three stories that caught my eye today: First up, Stowe Boyd found this quote about competing with internet research firms Gartner and Forrester: In our view, firms wishing to disrupt the Gartner and Forrester models must have two particular attributes. First, they need a significant differentiator. It can be in specialization, the business model, service […]
We keep hearing that the whole point of strategy is build a sustainable competitive advantage. This makes some sense, up to a point. The problem though is that the skills and routines that help us build one can also constrain us, and prevent us from responding to a changing environment. That change can be someone […]
Innovation is more than just generating ideas. Most organisations have more than enough ideas. They might need better ones, but usually they need to get better at selecting ideas, executing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The irony of this situation is that there are a lot of techniques around (and consultants that use them!) designed to […]
