Author Archives: John Steen
What’s better…. a lot of little innovations or one big innovation? If we had to choose, would it better to have an economy made up of a lot of firms trying to make small improvements to their business or do we want a game-changer like Apple or Google? The big innovations are glamorous and they become part of business folklore. Governments then spend a lot of effort trying to replicate the success of these companies by supporting businesses that might turn into the next Microsoft, GSK or Samsung. The trouble is that we need to go through a veritable haystack of businesses to eventually get these needles that grow from nothing to become global leaders in their industry. In hindsight we can say that Apple was always going to become a great business but hindsight is a misleading science. Someone who pointed to two strange kids (Jobs and Wozniak) at … Continue reading
I was in a meeting with a CEO the other day who is confronting the possibility that what sustained the business for the last few decades is probably not going to deliver growth for the future. Tim and I have been working with him for over a year and we both rate him very highly as a manager and strategist. What impressed me in his thinking about the future of the business was how willing he was to look outside his industry for examples of innovation and business models. Not only was he looking for new ideas on how to respond to emerging competitive threats, he also wanted business analogies so he could explain to his senior management team where he wanted to take the company. Analogies are powerful tools for thinking and learning. It’s easy to dismiss an idea because it comes from a different context but looking outside … Continue reading
There’s been a fair bit of chatter on the release of the global innovation index. It’s an impressive composite of many indicators of innovation and it thows out many interesting lists. According to the report, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore are the most innovative countries and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and China are the most efficient innovators (Braden Kelley has been doing a good job of reporting on the scores on this blog). Measuring innovation is very difficult and there is a classic tradeoff between scope and detail. The broader we want the results to be, the more we lose detail. My main issue with the Global Innovation Index is how much detail we need to lose to obtain a global ranking. In the blogosphere, I’m sure most people will focus on the lists so I’d like to spend a bit of time considering the data. The general approach with the … Continue reading
I’m probably going to get in trouble for this post because the answer to the title question is yes and no. I am employed by the University of Queensland which prides itself as being the most successful commercializer of research in Australia. However, I have never been convinced by the simple argument that universities matter because they produce groundbreaking research that can be patented and sold to commercial interests. While many academics believe this to be the case, the evidence shows that this is possibly the least important thing that a university can do for the business community. In a survey of firms in Brisbane, Australia we found that universities were relatively unimportant as sources of innovation. Customers, suppliers and competitors are far more important as sources of innovative ideas. That doesn’t mean that the three universities in Brisbane are doing a bad job or that Brisbane businesses should be … Continue reading
Innovation is a complex process and I’m always skeptical about simple solutions to encourage companies to be more innovative. Recently I have written about some evidence against the widely-held assumption that creating industry clusters will make firms in these clusters more innovative. It turns out the the relationship between industry clusters and innovation depends a lot more on the type of industry and where you are located. In other words, the belief that clusters = innovation breaks down when you look at why successful industry clusters form and what distinguishes them from unsuccessful clusters. Another simplistic assumption is that tax refunds for R&D investments will make firms do more R&D and therefore be more innovative. At face value this seems like a reasonable assumption but someone with a more cynical mind might say that this will just result in business trying to classify more activities as R&D, and this is … Continue reading
Every economic bust launches criminal charges against executives of failed companies. It’s been a few years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Global Financial Crisis but the court cases in many instances are still ongoing. One of the most notorious cases in Australia was the child-care center empire of ABC Learning Centers. The entrepreneur-founder Eddy Groves and another director are facing charges relating to shifting money out of the business in the months leading to the collapse. I do a lot of my strategy work with Kevin Hendry who has a keen interest in strategy and corporate failure. Kevin was the Asia-Pacific Vice President of Monsanto during its venture into GMO agriculture and has first-hand experience of the events that lead to a corporate blow-up. While we tend to focus on late-stage actions that end up in the courts, Kevin says that the beginnings of … Continue reading
