Let’s Debunk 4 Myths About How Great Companies Innovate. The following is an excerpt from Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t--and What That Means for Your Business by Jeffrey Phillips. In the United States alone there are hundreds of large, successful firms with recognizable brand names that we encounter every day. We constantly hear innovation success stories about firms like Apple and Procter & Gamble, but we rarely hear about innovation in their direct competitors, Dell and Unilever, much less about innovation in any of the thousands of firms worldwide that compete in these markets. In every region and industry the same pattern is repeated: A small handful of firms are recognized as consistent innovators, used as case studies and examples, while we hear little or nothing about innovation in the vast majority of the other firms in those industries.
Several possible factors spring to mind, including the executive management, the nature of the industry, or the capabilities of a firm’s research and development teams. W. Innovation Metrics - A Whole Brain Strategy. By Mike Brown Metrics strategy is a vital topic relative to innovation. Depsite how important metrics strategy is, it's a challenging one for many businesses when it comes to innovation. Going back through my own experiences and secondary research on innovation metrics, here are a few starting thoughts on developing your metrics strategy: Begin developing your innovation metrics strategy by determining what factors drive ROI.
Specifically identify which factors increase positive business returns and which reduce necessary investment. Starting with the end result in mind will better align the overall innovation effort toward delivering a positive return on investment. Adopt a "whole-brain metrics" orientation. Within the whole-brain approach, consider three distinct types of metrics related to innovation: This is hardly an exhaustive treatment on innovation metrics strategy, but it can be a good starter for expanding what you're doing now. Leading in a Hyperconnected World. Three reasons to change how your organization communicates. With the rise of new digital media platforms and social networks, people are absorbing information at a greater velocity and from a wider set of channels than ever before; they are also using that information in new ways. Anyone with an Internet connection or cell phone can share their ideas, influence public opinion, or even spark a movement for change.
Yet while technology and the Internet have evolved rapidly over the last decade, our understanding of what it means to be a leader in this new, networked society has not kept pace. Leadership has become distributed and collaborative. The new reality is that leaders don’t lead alone. We are all part of a much broader problem-solving network, with many high-performing organizations and individuals—public and private—working on different parts of the same problem or even the same part of the same problem. Mine all stages of the “knowledge life cycle” Let go, decentralize. Disruptions: Innovations Like Instagram Are Tough for Large Companies. Continuous Improvement Is About Engaging Employees :: WNYmedia.net. Why Apple is Winning: Innovation, Opportunity and Execution. Apple is building one of the most stunning financial runs in the history of corporate America, as Tuesday’s blowout showing affirmed. The company says it’s sold over 365 million digital devices over the last five years — 50 million last quarter alone — and is currently averaging nearly $4 billion in monthly profit.
It has amassed $110 billion in cash. Most insanely, this could just be the beginning: Apple is exceedingly well-positioned to take advantage of several major trends in the new digital economy. Thanks to a combination of anticipation and luck, Apple — which nearly went bankrupt before the last tech boom — is poised for even greater heights if it can continue to out-think, out-innovate and out-execute its competitors. Here are three major forces buoying Apple’s growth and pushing the company forward. Opportunity: Three ongoing trends have created the environment for Apple to continue its ascent: Smartphones, tablets, and Asia. The #Innovation Insurgent Daily. Sorry, Strivers - Talent Matters. Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing.
By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled. Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.”
But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Paul4innovating's Blog | Building the Innovation DNA. Why Innovations Are Arguments. Too many executives confuse what an innovation is with what an innovation would do for them if they had one. The solution? Think of innovation as an if-then argument. Henry Ford’s argument for the Model T can be expressed as an if-then statement. Image courtesy of Ford Motor Company. Attend almost any conference on innovation, and one will hear someone in the audience ask, “Yes, but how are you defining ‘innovation’?” Why is there no clear, shared meaning of “innovation”? The problem is a serious one, not the least because companies send engineers, “technology entrepreneurs” and “technology scouts” in search of innovations when a shared understanding of what they are looking for may not exist across the organization’s people and functions or between “scouts” and managers.
I propose that all true innovations are arguments. Let me explain. Arguments can always be expressed as if-then statements: If we agree to a proposition being true, sound or valid, then we can infer a conclusion. Compete on Know-Why, Not Know-How - Adam Richardson. By Adam Richardson | 12:50 PM April 12, 2012 Do you know why you make the products or offer the services you do? Too often I find that companies don’t have a clear enough sense of why they do what they do. They get stuck making incremental improvements that are rooted in existing competencies, markets, and business models. This is especially problematic when companies decide to innovate. If you don’t have a clear understanding of why you are pursuing an innovation, you risk being wasteful and ineffective, and could lack strong differentiators from incumbents. I call these types of insights core insights, a concept which I first introduced in my book, Innovation X.
A case in point: The Prius has become such a strategic product that Toyota is in the process of turning it into a full sub-brand and a range of vehicles. But the success of the Prius wasn’t a slam dunk. So how do you sell a more expensive economy car, especially one with an unfamiliar, unproven technology? 1. 2. 3. The "random collision" theory of innovation. This post originally appeared on the Fortune website. Leaders tend to surround themselves with people who are like them. Creating environments where "unusual suspects" can meet is the key to generating new business ideas.
Collaborators are everywhere. You will find them in the gray areas between silos. Just look up from your current business model. It is human nature to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. It is easy to see the potential from enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Social media is a hotspot for random collisions. The goal is to get better faster. We live and work in a networked world complete with mega bandwidth and social media platforms to help us collide with more unusual suspects if we just look up from our silos. Business model innovators are all around us. This piece is adapted from The Business Model Innovation Factory. The social side of strategy - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategy in Practice.
In 2009, Wikimedia launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 volunteers generated some 900 proposals for the company’s future direction and then categorized, rationalized, and formed task forces to elaborate on them. The result was a coherent strategic plan detailing a set of beliefs, priorities, and related commitments that together engendered among participants a deep sense of dedication to Wikimedia’s future.
Through the launch of several special projects and the continued work of self-organizing teams dedicated to specific proposals, the vision laid out in the strategic plan is now unfolding. Wikimedia’s effort to crowdsource its strategy probably sounds like an outlier—after all, the company’s very existence rests on collaborative content creation. Our objective in this article isn’t to present a definitive road map for opening up the strategy process; it’s simply too early for one to exist.
Closer to home. CEOs Cite Innovation as a Key to Business Models -- and Even Our Energy Future. 2012 Global CEO Study. Overview For some time, businesses have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners. But something just as meaningful has been happening – the sudden convergence of the digital, social and mobile spheres – connecting customers, employees and partners in new ways to organizations and to each other.
In speaking face-to-face with 1,709 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders around the globe, leaders confirmed that our new connected era is changing how people engage. How are CEOs responding to the complexity of increasingly interconnected organizations, markets, societies and governments? Our key findings center on: Empowering employees through values CEOs see greater organizational openness ahead. Videos: CEOs discuss their employee priorities Shared values driving key decisions CEO Murray Jordan of Foodstuffs, a New Zealand food cooperative, extolls the benefits of shared values for his company. View this video (00:02:05) Tweet this video. How Coping Strategies can Make Your Business Less Relevant When was the last time you took a fresh look at the value or relevance of your business to today’s marketplace?
Did you take action? Businesses of all types, sizes and locations are impacted by shifting global business conditions, rapidly changing business models and innovation. These forces cause a shift in the context of business, what is meaningful and of value to customers. Slipping out of context happens unless one takes deliberate actions to adapt. There is a pressing need to acquire and deploy the business acumen that gets beyond coping to adapting and thriving.
Innovation Is a Double-edged Sword Innovation is touted as the solution. Former GE CEO, Jack Welch once said, When the change on the outside is faster than the change on the inside – the end is near. Large-scale studies confirm what most business leaders feel that the volatility and growing complexity of the business climate undermine “business as usual.” Innovation Isn't About New Products, It's About Changing Behavior. Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the opportunity a new business model has to evolve and take advantage of the new behavior. It's The Behavior, Stupid We are at the tail end of an era that has focused almost entirely on the innovation of products and services, and we are at the beginning of a new era that focuses on the innovation of what I like to call "behavioral business models. " These models go beyond asking how we can make what we make better and cheaper, or asking how we can do what we do faster.
They are about asking why we do what we do to begin with. And the question of why is almost always tied to the question of how markets behave. Google did not invent Internet search—there were nearly fifty software vendors delivering Internet-based search, some for as long as twenty-five years before Google! All of these are examples of innovations in behavior that led to entirely new business models. Cloud-based Dialogue. How to Avoid the Innovation Death Spiral. Consider this all too familiar scenario: Company X’s new products developed and launched with great expectations, yield disappointing results.
Yet, these products continue to languish in the market, draining management attention, advertising budgets, manufacturing capacity, warehouse space and back office systems. Wouter Koetzier explores how to avoid the innovation death spiral. Compounding the problem, fewer resources are available to invest in other initiatives that may prove far more innovative and fuel profitable growth. We call this the “innovation death spiral,” a cycle in which far too many firms find themselves today. Balancing innovation In contrast, companies taking a bolder, more far-sighted approach to innovation are on the opposite trajectory: becoming a high-performing organization.
Financially, companies simply do not generate the growth premiums with incremental innovations that they do with platform or breakthrough innovations. Inside the death spiral Strategic impact. John Hagel on "Invisible Innovation" Some time Bloomberg Businessweek columnists John Hagel III and John Seely Brown have, with their colleague from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, Lang Davison, written this year’s must-read book on innovation. Building on their work on The Shift Index, itself important reading for any executive looking to get to grips with innovation in the 21st century, the key to The Power of Pull is in its subtitle: “How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion”.
The book is a smart analysis of why executives need to broaden their thinking about innovation—and take action, now. Recently, I caught up with John Hagel in New York City to discuss some of the book’s themes and examples, in particular the different approaches to innovation in different regions of the world. An edited transcript of our conversation follows. After the jump, a short video of Hagel and Seely Brown discussing the premise of the book. And where is that taking place? We’ve become efficient beyond our wildest dreams. Mental Nimbleness for Executive and How to Enhance It
The more the business environment changes, the faster the value of what you know at any point in time diminishes. In this world, success hinges on the ability to participate in a growing array of knowledge flows in order to rapidly refresh your knowledge stocks. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lane Davison While new knowledge flows are important, they are not enough! A major challenge that confronts business leaders is seeing how change and innovation, external to their own organization, can lead to new possibilities to create and deliver value to customers.
This requires business leaders to enhance their adaptive potential and their ability to make mindshifts. The illustration below is a New System of Engagement. Seeing new possibilities requires a mindshift–a new way of envisioning what is relevant and meaningful to customers. Netflix, Zappos and Groupon are three great examples of companies who exploited the potential of technology and leveraged the growing number of customers online.
Strategy, Context, and the Decline of Sony - Sohrab Vossoughi. Www.strategy-business.com/media/file/00078.pdf. Don’t Become Obsolete in Your Market « Strategyn Blog. Www.strategy-business.com/media/file/sb65-11404-Global-Innovation-1000-Why-Culture-Is-Key.pdf. Does Creativity Require Constraints? The Making of an Innovation Master - Scott Anthony. The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It? Innovation methodology. Killing Creativity: Why Kids Draw Pictures of Monsters & Adults Don't | Moments of Genius. Strategic Questions for an Accelerating World - Colin Raney.