How Not to Manage Innovation - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org. By Umair Haque | 6:05 PM May 14, 2009 Welcome to the zombieconomy — where things happen backwards. Case in point: today’s best example of how not to manage innovation comes from those who should be masters of radical innovation: venture investors. The venture industry is in crisis because of an ongoing inability to grow and nurture meaningful innovation. I’ve come across many examples recently — a tweet from an investor asking “where is Twitter’s ROI?” , or sessions I’ve run where investors have focused on business models, while failing to build a fuller strategic understanding. Let’s use Jeremy Liew’s recent analysis — a fun read — of Apple’s iPhone Apps Store to outline how not to manage innovation. Focus on short-run numbers. The point? Apply surface economics. The point? Be strategy-blind. The point? Fail to see the right context. The point? Never have an ideal. The fundamental error above is simple.
The best way to learn is to learn from other people’s mistakes. R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists - Navi Radjou. By Navi Radjou | 4:56 PM June 10, 2009 Recently GE made a big splash by announcing a $3 billion R&D investment over the next six years to develop low-cost healthcare equipment targeted at underserved populations — who primarily live in emerging markets like India, Brazil, and South Africa. With most Western economies staying in the red through 2010, expect more Western firms to emulate GE and bet their organizations’ future on emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil whose resilient economies keep growing. To enable this global expansion strategy, these multinationals are poised to dramatically beef up their R&D capabilities in developing nations. While I am happy that Western CEOs are finally putting their money where their market mouth is by broadening their R&D footprint in emerging nations, I worry that they may not be investing in the right R&D model, and particularly not in the appropriate talent mix.
Anthropologists and ethnographers. Want to Keep Your Job? Stop Trying to Fit In - Peter Bregman - By Peter Bregman | 3:40 PM May 12, 2009 I was running along the six-mile loop in Central Park on a cold winter day when I passed the southern most end of the park where I noticed a large number of miserable looking pedicab drivers huddled together to keep warm. Periodically one reached out to a passing pedestrian, but no one seemed to want a ride in a bicycle-drawn carriage. It was too cold. And then, to my surprise, a little further along the run I saw a pedicab — with passengers in it — circling the park. The reason this pedicab had been hired instead of the others was immediately obvious. On both sides of his small carriage hung signs with large letters that read “HEATED SEATS.” In any highly competitive field — and these days every field is highly competitive — being different is the only way to win.
Yet, even though we all know that, most of us spend a tremendous amount of effort trying not to be different. But fitting in has the opposite effect. It’s simply easier to be unique. Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0 - Tom Davenport - HarvardBusiness.or. By Tom Davenport | 9:42 AM June 15, 2009 The proponents of 2.0 thinking on user-generated content, be they fans of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Health 2.0, or Rhubarb 2.0, would have us believe that their highly participative approach is the only one that works.
And indeed, there is an appeal in democratizing content creation and management. However, in almost every case there is also value in professional involvement. Take health care, for example. A couple of months ago there was a conference in Boston (I was unable to attend) on “Health 2.0 meets Ix.” For those unfamiliar with this debate, Health 2.0 fans advocate patients taking control of their own health care and sharing information across patient communities, rather than turning it over to professionals.
In all likelihood, you’d go for both. The same is true in many other content settings. Inside enterprises, the same 1.5 mix is often desirable. The Importance of Failed Innovation - Scott Anthony - HarvardBus. By Scott Anthony | 8:53 PM March 30, 2009 I had an interesting dialogue with an innovation practitioner in a large corporation the other day. We were talking about how the high rate of innovation failure can hamstring innovation. “The failure rate is actually irrelevant,” he said. “It’s the risk associated with those failures that gets you into trouble.” In other words, failure would be fine, if it wasn’t so darn expensive.
Because failures cost money (and time), high failure rates can cause corporations to become very gun shy about innovation. Of course, one way out of this problem is to increase the innovation success rate. For example, a company can almost always “succeed” by introducing “new and improved” products that cannibalize what they already sell. The real answer is to dramatically decrease the cost of failure. Lower the costs of experiments. Pulling these levers requires embracing the notion of “good enough.” And finally, remember that failure is not a dirty word.