Monthly Archives: October 2009
Developing Agile Innovation Leadership through Gamingby Simon Evans and Victor NewmanThe Problem with InnovationIt is a truism that armies tend to continue to fight their last war and need to go through bitter learning experiences before they can understand and adapt to the new, emergent rules of conflict. Present innovation thinking is constrained by legacy successes achieved within a context of unsustainable economic market growth patterns and obsolete models.This recession is heightening a natural fear of risk and failure, which combined with a perception of increasing innovation difficulty (as highlighted by the Boston Consulting Group reviews in the past couple of years), is encouraging management caution toward innovation. This is reducing leaders’ ability to recognise, understand and manage the full range of options available, and this is slowing the pace of innovation (innovation velocity).We need some new tools to help us deliver approaches to innovation that better suit the emerging … Continue reading
I have been pondering on this since I had some comments on my The Faces Of Open Innovation post where I expressed some concern that most of the profiles working with open innovation had an engineering background.In the blog post, I mentioned that engineers do add value to innovation, but we need to get a broader focus in the overall innovation process by giving room to other functions and competences as well. Innovation should be about much more than just technology and products for which many engineers have a tendency to over-focus on.Two comments in particular caught my interest. The first one went like this:”Why so surprised at the preponderance of engineers in the open innovation community? Good engineers are, by necessity, innovative. This is not so obvious with other professions. Engineers are prone to share, to seek out other engineers when they face a mental block.”Wow! Are good engineers … Continue reading
Once you have a systematic and routine way to innovate, you are confronted with a new problem – how to decide how much innovation is enough. For many, this is an odd question. If innovation is essential for survival and growth, most people would want all the innovation they can get. But that is oversimplifying. Too much innovation can overload the system, confuse the organization, and lead to ideation fatigue. So how much is enough?Here is a useful analysis that can tell you how many ideas are needed to reach your specific growth targets called “Mapping the Innovation Gap.”The steps are:Determine your revenue goals in each year over a specific time horizon. Base this on your firm’s strategic planning time horizon (usually 3 to 10 years depending on the industry). Use the actual revenue targets from your company’s business plan.Break these annual revenue targets down over a mix of products, … Continue reading
Crowdsourcing is becoming a part of many companies’ innovation strategy. But crowdsourcing suffers from a number of problems that limit its effectiveness. By selecting ‘emerging customers’ – who are better at spotting winning innovations – and helping them innovate around unmet customer needs, crowdsourcing can be turned into smartsourcing. Leading companies like Cisco already use smartsourcing to identify tomorrow’s winning innovations.Peter Drucker the gurus’ guru famously said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Marketing is hard enough to get right, but innovation is a whole lot harder still. Depending on the industry, about 80% of new products fail on introduction in the market. And up to 60% fail in reintroduction. To overcome this disastrous failure rate, companies have started to recruit … Continue reading
MBA students are taught to treat business in a rational, scientific way. They analyze situations, develop financial models, critically examine management decisions and logically examine different scenarios. When they emerge from the hallowed halls of academia, they are often surprised to find that businesses run much less on logic and much more on emotion. It is not cold, intelligent analysis that drives most organizations forward. Emotional energy is often the real engine behind successful people and organisations.Sure it helps to be analytical, intelligent and rational – but what makes people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs great business leaders is not their undoubted intelligence but their passion and commitment to their cause.One of the richest men in Britain is Felix Dennis, who made his fortune in publishing. In 1971 he was jailed for publishing an obscene political cartoon but he was acquitted on appeal. His success started …
I agree with Tom Hayes and Michael Malone in their belief that “Entrepreneurs Can Lead Us Out of the Crisis.” Why? Because entrepreneurs have the agility, flexibility, and grit to make change happen. Innovation is the chief tool of the entrepreneur. Hayes and Malone outline about a half dozen ways the new administration can help them. And those ways are by and large subtractive, a key element of elegance.1. Kill Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s massive, expensive, and sucks needed capital.2. Remove the shackles on tax-free retirement money, or remove taxes on accounts intended to fund new ventures. (like a 529)3. Eliminate payroll taxes. It’s a burden, and stops the creation of new jobs.4. Lower capital gains taxes on venture capital investments in early stage startups.5. Help big business think small to return to an entrepreneurial mindset by providing an incentive to take risk and create new jobs. There’s none of that in … Continue reading
