innovationmanagement

It is never boring working with innovation. Things happen faster and faster and frequent changes on HOW we innovate have become the norm rather than the exception. Continue reading →

PatrickTV takes us into the latest from AMEX & Twitter. This is a commerce game change in social media, and sends waves of implications for business today and tomorrow. Continue reading →

Think different. That’s the essence of creative processes in coming up with ideas for innovative products, services or business models. An awful lot brainstorms or ideation workshops take place to generate fresh new ideas. At the end of idea generation you end up with a wall of ideas. Which is great! I like to quote the American chemist and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling who said “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”. Continue reading →

While compiling data for the Customization500 study over a period of 12 months, the researchers noticed that roughly 20% of the companies went out of business during this time. In part 7 of this series, we take a closer look at the reasons why both startups and established companies fail at implementing mass customization and in what areas managers can expect the strongest resistance.

The Financial Times featured an article last week calling the patent system the curse of innovation. Patents have become weapons of mass destruction in certain industries, most recently in the smartphone category. Continue reading →

Can government help companies innovate, or do they tend to get in the way instead? The answer is that often regulations tend to impede innovation and progress. Other key aspects of a country's ability to innovate are the relative risk tolerance of its citizenry and whether it is culturally accepted to try and fail at something. Continue reading →

The relationship between strategy, leadership and organisational performance continues to be an area of major interest for practitioners, academics and the business media.  For example, the recent and untimely death of Steve Jobs has sparked a wave of interest in into his leadership characteristics and their links to Apple’s strategy and performance.

As a strategist, I am keenly interested in how leaders can better contribute to developing and executing strategy that creates value. In this and in subsequent blogs, I plan to talk about a topic that John and I call Leading Strategic Conversations. You’re probably thinking that the role of leadership in strategy has been explored in the past and you’re right but I believe the time is right to revisit it now for two key reasons. 

First, thinking and practice at the intersection of strategy and leadership have changed significantly over the last 20 years. Strategic management has traditionally been a highly analytical, planning oriented discipline. It has drawn heavily on the field of economics, focusing on the structural aspects of industries, on the positioning of organisations in those industries, and emphasising the content of strategy as its core.

This traditional perspective positioned the CEO as an elite level planner who worked with a centralised planning department and external consultants to develop an organisation’s strategic direction. Formulation was seen as the difficult part, one that commanded the real thinking effort and lion’s share of time and attention. Execution was seen as the easy part and was handed down to lower levels in the organisation to worry about. 

In more recent times we’ve seen the rise and fall (well, almost the fall) of ‘celebrity CEOs’. This fad has involved boards of directors importing highly paid, ‘charismatic’ and usually ego-centric individuals whose role was to develop a grand vision for their new organisation and then pass it down to their loyal ‘helpers’ for execution.

In this sense the celebrity CEO perspective is consistent with the traditional perspective of strategic management – formulation is still the critical part of a leader’s contribution to strategy and execution is still the easy part, something for others to worry about. However, the celebrity CEO has a more elevated status  and a significantly higher compensation package than the  planner CEO but usually does not deliver commensurate and sustainable organisational performance. 

Contrast these two perspectives with Jim Collins’ concept of Level 5 Leadership, especially Collins’ emphasis on leaders who guide the ‘shared insights’ of their executive team (http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html). Level 5 Leadership and Collins’ notion of the ‘flywheel’ relentlessly building momentum for change were early signs that the boundaries between strategy development and strategy execution were becoming blurred and that leadership attention was taking a more balanced and simultaneous focus on both areas.

 Over the last 10 years there has been a growing acceptance in the practitioner literature of the critical role of leaders in strategizing – developing and executing strategy on a continuous basis – as opposed to strategy as a plan or a ‘grand vision’.

This focus on strategizing is significant because it recognises strategy not only as a dynamic, adaptive and open-ended process but also as a social practice, one in which both development and execution require social interaction between individuals and groups at various levels both within and external to the organisation in question.

CEOs who see their role as strategizing will recognise that strategy development and execution are inextricably interlinked, an everyday practice that is the responsibility of the entire senior management team. As a result, these CEOs will behave very differently to planner or celebrity CEOs. 

Second, recent advances in thinking about the business model concept enable leaders to gain a better grasp on the link between strategy and value creation. The business model concept is something that Tim has mentioned frequently in this blog. I plan to go into it more in subsequent blogs. However, my key point at this stage is that articulating a business model requires that  you get beyond what are often vague notions of competitive advantage and clearly define the dimensions of value you are trying to create for customers, stakeholders and the organisation itself.

 Business model thinking provides a logic for strategy integration and execution, one that is linked to these dimensions of value. It also provides a new framework for understanding corporate versus business level strategy and for business model innovation. 

In our consulting work and in our strategy teaching John and I have synthesised the changes in thinking and practice around the intersection of strategy & leadership with the emerging perspectives on business models. We talk about leaders enacting their strategy role  through leading strategic conversations – through enabling, encouraging and guiding vigorous, iterative dialogue on strategy, and reaching shared insights aimed at creating and re-creating value on a continuous basis. Leading strategic conversations involves a virtuous cycle through 8 key focal points: 

In subsequent blogs I will explain the focal points in the Strategic Conversations cycle.

 

Until a business model idea sees the light of day in the real world, it is impossible to know if it will really work. Continue reading →

Judith Glaser’s evolutionary mind-mapping technique approaches business growth in a new way. Continue reading →

This week we continue a featured series of some of my favorite innovation-related quotes. Please contribute your favorite innovation quotes in the comments and I'll feature the best submissions in next week's Innovation Quotes of the Week! Continue reading →

This week, I've prepared a round up of press articles on business, economics, entrepreneurship and music. Starting with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, who has just opened an enterprise business in the UK Continue reading →

Are Six Sigma and Innovation inherent enemies or powerful allies? Some would say that Six Sigma and innovation are diametrically opposed goals for an organization to pursue. Some say that organizations cannot excel at both and would point to the issues that 3M has run into with its ability to innovate after a CEO James McNerny came in and introduced Six Sigma into the organization. Continue reading →

In this keynote, Frederick details the critical points of change that corporations need to address in transforming their culture from laggards to innovative leaders. As enterprise businesses consider what social media and the concept of real-time can do to their brand, Frederick shares the technical secrets of what it takes to scale the challenges technically. Continue reading →

Some ideas are so powerful they change you. More precisely, some ideas are so powerful you change your beliefs to fit them. These powerful ideas come in two strains: those that already align with your beliefs and those that contradict. Continue reading →

The Crowdfunding Industry Report has been released and it’s got some interesting numbers and some interesting predictions included in it. The information summarized in the report comes from two sources: The Crowdfunding Industry Survey (whose data is from the first quarter of 2012) as well as research from other Crowdsourcing.org sources.

The most humbling number, of course, is the report that crowdfunding platforms collectively raised almost $1.5 billion in 2011. And with the information that Crowdsourcing.org has already amassed, they report that market is set to double in 2012. Which means we’re now talking about a $3 billion industry.

What I also found interesting was how the crowdfunding world was parceled out into four different platforms:

-Equity-based crowdfunding (where funders receive earn something back for their investment) -Lending-based crowdfunding (lenders expect repayment of donations) -Reward-based crowdfunding (funders receive other non-monetary benefits for their donation) -Donation-based crowdfunding (where the motivation is purely philanthropic)

Surprisingly, it’s the reward-based model that currently accounts for the most amount of money in the crowdfunding industry (79%) at the moment (probably due in large part to Kickstarter’s model for success). Lending is currently the category with the smallest share, but that may change with the new crowdfunding bill.

Another highlight of the report concerned the rate at which fundraising takes place. The popular theory is that the first 25% of funds take longer to raise than the last 25%. However, according to crowdsourcing.org, it takes approximately 2.84 weeks to raise the first 25% and then 3.18 weeks to raise the last 25% on average. And the lending-based campaigns take less time than equity or donation campaigns. These figures could be important when considering crowdfunding strategies.

What else do you think will change in the crowdfunding world in the coming year? How do you see the models for crowdfunding engagement changing as a result of its prevalence?

Ideas are going through the innovation funnel and only few percent will reach the end. What's happening with the army of ideas lost inside it? How will their creators find out what happened? Continue reading →

Global Innovation Forum is a dynamic meeting that brings together professionals with diverse backgrounds, great experience and knowledge. It creates the perfect opportunity to build a strong professional network, obtain new insights and share business practices. The event is inspiring and offers “hands-on”, innovative suggestions on how to find practical answers and generate own successful [...]

Confabulation happens all the time in the business world. And it’s no laughing matter. Tweet me your confabulation sniglets. Once we compile them, I’ll publish them in a future blog. Continue reading →

Marlow combines his plans and experience with Susan's knowledge of the organization to create a rough outline of the innovation game plan. Can they refine the details to make sure their plan aligns with the goals and budget they’d been given?

We Americans need to wake up – now -- and stop acting like spoiled, immature children. Elected officials need to put aside partisanship – now – and do what’s in the best interest of our country and speak the truth to the electorate. And we all must do this without fostering and perpetuating certain convenient misconceptions and without coddling us like soft, over-indulgent parents afraid to say “no.” Continue reading →