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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about innovation and how we may have emphasized one component at the expense of another. Here I’m talking about something that should appear obvious – the focus of innovation in building new things. We are constantly reminded that innovation is about building new products and services and experiences. And this definition is entirely right ...

When a noted doyen of the Fortune 500 like Coca Cola talks innovation, your ears should perk up. After all the consumer packaged goods conglomerate has been in business for a long time, and has been successful, but is facing a number of headwinds in its core business. Selling sugary drinks seems passe, as bottled water, energy drinks and other ...

Darwin teaches us that evolution is a long, slow process, gradually leading to new adaptive species that emerge over time with specialized capabilities. Therefore, the change in species from generation to generation may be relatively small, but always purposeful and testing the best ways to win in a niche. Just as both the Chihuahua and the Newfoundland emerged from evolution ...

You’ve heard it before – the pace of change is accelerating. I can present all of the technology adoption charts, the fascinating nuggets of data that tell you how quickly different products or technologies were acquired by millions of customers. And so on and so on. You already know this. Change is real, and change is accelerating. Whether we are ...

So we come to the ultimate post on explore and exploit, at least for now. In past posts we’ve looked at the origin of explore and exploit, the emergence of true innovation explorers like Edison, Bell and a host of others. We’ve noticed the rise of the corporation to exploit the discoveries of said explorers. Last but not least we ...

In my last two posts I examined the origin of explore and exploit, and where it has taken us so far in the innovation space. In this post I want to explore why everything we believe about explore and exploit from a strategic and business model perspective is increasingly wrong, and what innovators and strategists need to do now in ...

If you are following along, I’m writing a series of posts about the opportunities and challenges with the way we think about and implement the concepts behind explore and exploit. In my first post I wrote a short introduction to the topic. In that post I looked at the history of exploring and exploiting, which I’ll suggest comes from the ...

In so many ways it often feels like innovation is both wholly new, and ancient at the same time. Tools that we use to innovate aren’t new, in fact many are very old, but put to appropriate use they help us create miraculous new things. Too often we distrust old tools or methods, thinking that newer tools or methods are ...

It seems so funny, looking back on a meeting I attended about 20 years ago. At that meeting a good friend was presenting a new book, entitled Who Moved My Cheese? He was recommending this book to all of us in the leadership team of a mid-sized ERP consulting firm. Of course most of us read it and thought – ...

Oscar Wilde, perhaps one of the most acerbic and humorous writers of the 19th century, once commented that a second marriage after a failed first marriage was the “triumph of hope over experience”. His point was that people continued to pursue marriage, even in the face of bitter previous failure. Now Wilde was a bachelor, and also unable to marry ...