Every growth leader is sooner or later faced with the challenge of turning a minority opinion into the majority viewpoint. Typically, the innovator will have had time to develop the innovation in a very small group environment, where it has become clear that it is an idea worthy of commitment from the larger enterprise. The enterprise […]
It’s there in every organization: the door between the ideation and planning stage of innovation and the operational portion of the firm. You’ll find this door in services firms, manufacturing companies and not for profits. In addition to being the gateway between the virtual and tangible, it’s also the door between profits and losses. Management […]
In my travels and speaking engagements, I am running across an increasing number of mid-cap organizations that are looking to become innovative – however, senior leadership feels they’ve “sold out” all their resources to support their existing businesses. To be clear, these are very successful firms – all with good market share and highly focused […]
I had a great dialogue with a colleague this week about the very deep and broad impact that big data is having on disruptive business model discovery. This applies to those businesses that are just forming, as well as innovation programs in larger enterprises. There is a massive change underway that is in the blind […]
In this blog, we frequently explore emerging organizational trends, with particular emphasis on those that fit with the meme of empowering small firms to have large results. Since 2008, one trend we’ve watched is the rise of the small firm and business unit and the huge influence it has had on both the parent company and the industry at large. […]
The recent news that Apple is looking at a $3.2B acquisition of the DRE music business – much larger than it’s usual pattern – brings up an interesting question: What happens when a company moves from smaller deals that are easily digested into core business and product operations, to larger and more highly valued entities? […]
I have been taking my readers through a series of posts on innovation decision making built around the WRAP process from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive. The WRAP acronym allows you to remember their four decision anchors – Widen your options, Reality test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding and Prepare to be wrong. […]
I have been taking my readers through a series of posts on innovation decision making built around the WRAP process from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive. The WRAP acronym allows you to remember their four decision anchors – Widen your options, Reality Test Your Assumptions, Attain distance before deciding and Prepare to be wrong. […]
The set of decisions that take place over which programs and projects to pursue is the highest leverage point for the senior team of any organization. In this series, we explore the intersection between the latest work on making high-quality decisions and establishing innovation portfolios. This is the second post (if you’d like to start […]
The decision gate leading to advanced development – where new concepts are fully vetted and prepared for release and commercialization – is the most critical control point for innovation in any organization. In small firms, this can be the time between when the founder has an idea to when he asks his team to “make […]
