Monthly Archives: May 2011
Last week Intellectual Ventures revealed its list of major investors. On it were several major U.S. research universities and research organizations. Brown University Cornell University Grinnell College Mayo Clinic Northwestern University Stanford University University of Minnesota University of Pennsylvania University of Southern California University of Texas You may be asking yourself, so what’s the big deal about a university investing its endowment in Intellectual Ventures? After all, according to conventional dictates of what constitutes as “good investment,” Intellectual Ventures is a real and legitimate company led by a famous and well-established executive team. In fact, over the past decade, it has raised $5 billion from investors and has grown to employ 650 employees and at last count, has accumulated a patent portfolio roughly the size of IBM’s – 30,000 active patents. Sure, the company is the target of controversy and criticism due to its business model, but that hasn’t stopped … Continue reading
Interview – Steven Cristol – Strategic Harmony® Partners I had the opportunity to interview Steven Cristol, Founder and Managing Partner of Strategic Harmony® Partners about branding, innovation and sustainability. Strategic Harmony® Partners is a strategy consulting firm, and holds a patent for the first decision model to align and integrate product strategy and brand strategy. Here is the text from the interview: 1. Do strategies for brand, product, and innovation need to be closely linked? Absolutely. That linkage is the key to one of the biggest questions companies ask me: “How can we ensure that every dollar we spend on product development will ultimately create shareholder value?” Brand equity is central to this, as there’s a half century of research in the marketing literature documenting the links and correlations between stronger brands and greater revenue, fatter margins, lower selling costs and lower cost of capital. So the challenge then becomes … Continue reading
Innovation is no serendipity” says Braden Kelley in Innovation is No Accident: “When it comes to innovation, good ideas are a dime of a dozen”. The story of Newton’s falling apple is surely not what happened to Charles Goodyear: “Discovery holds meaning only for the one whose mind is prepared to draw an inference, the one who has applied himself most perseveringly to the subject.” Actually Braden claims: “innovation thrives within an environment with some structure and constraints, it is not a solo activity and requires that collaboration be fostered with a formalized approach”. It includes innovation meaning for your organization, innovation language, vision, strategy, goals, process, financing, innovation portfolio, projects staffing and funding, instrumenting to learn fast. Similarly, in Rapid innovation model and Innovation: thoughts for thoughts from 24 years ago, I have suggested innovation projects should be sparkled with a “creative tension”. What is creative tension, and how … Continue reading
In most business ideas, there is a direct correlation between how audacious and risky an idea is and its innovativeness and reward potential. Disruptive innovation – in other words, innovative ideas which disrupt industry and dramatically change a business sector – are inevitably audacious and highly risky. They are also highly innovative and, if they work as hoped, bring in huge rewards. Consider Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis who developed their own voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) devised a business – Skype – around it and offered easy, free telephone calls over the World Wide Web as well as dirt cheap calls from the Web to ordinary telephones. Their business model was audacious: a couple of Swedish guys take on the world’s telephone service providers; it was innovative; and it was risky. People might well have decided they were not ready for VoIP; they might not trust the system; or … Continue reading
A friend’s recent quoting of Winston Churchill stroke me as a good summary of the innovator’s mindset. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” “Success is not final” makes the case for innovation: no enterprise, however successful it may have been, can continue to compete and grow without refreshing its offering and sometimes re-inventing its business and indeed itself. “Failure is not fatal” illustrates the need for the innovative enterprise to inject a healthy dose of trial-and-error in its processes and culture. In organizations where mistakes and failures are not tolerated, risk-aversion, not innovation, will become the prevalent culture. Of course, permanent failure is not an option, but anybody can guess that Churchill would not have advocated it. “It is the courage to continue that counts” stands as a reminder that innovation is the produce of hard work, not the effortless … Continue reading
I pondered on this question and decided to reach out to some of my friends at Psion, a leader on rugged mobile computing solutions. Their CEO is John Conoley. He joined Psion in 2008 and he decided early on that open innovation was the way forward for Psion. He does a great job of sharing insights seen from the executive perspective on their efforts and one of his tools is to write frequently on his own blog. I am impressed by his approach and I have enjoyed my interactions with him so I looked forward to the responses from my Psion friends on the above question. This is how they replied: Ability to balance the “here and now” (quarterly focus on revenue, P&L etc) with the longer term view of differentiation and leadership. The two rarely align, and it is a unique skill set to see both sides of the … Continue reading
