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How to develop innovative products that consumers will buy? (2/2)


I’m always suprised to see how much we’ve turned failure into a nessary pre-requisite for success. I was talking to a Partner of large VC firm and he informed that only 20% of his firm’s investments turned out positive; another Partner in Corporate Venture Capital Fund informed me that one typically needs to loose 10ME before getting proficient at investing in innovation start-ups, whose…

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How to develop disruptive innovations that consumers will buy? (1/2)


Leading companies who to launch innovative products often have to face a tough fact: 70% of innovative products fail to find a sustainable market. And, this is also true of innovation start-ups, making it that much harder to get senior management to commit to creating an innovative spin-off company. Many of these difficulties would be alleviated, if, somehow, we could refer to principles which…

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Succeeding at disruptive innovation (2/2)


Make no mistake: disruptive innovation is no magic box. It’s not a question of sudden enlightment or mystical union with nature, but a question of understanding. Understanding disruptive innovation will dramatically improve one’s ability to be successful at it. Assessing whether a given innovation is disruptive or not may be done by asking three questions. The first two deal with consumers. The third, and…

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What does disruptive innovation disrupt?


Defining disruptive means explaining what disruptive innovation is disrupting. In addition to disruptive pricing in the case of low-end disruptive innovation and market segmentation in the case of new market disruptive innovation, disruptive innovation also disrupts our definition of performance as well as established value networks.

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What’s disruptive innovation?


As we participate in project team meetings with people around the world, people from different parts of the organization and people that may work outside of the organization, I’m always fascinated to see how we’ve been able to build a common vocabulary. Whether it’s the term “open innovation”, “incremental innovation”, “strategic innovation”, “breakthrough innovation”, “product innovation”, “market innovation” or “disruptive innovation”, we seem to…

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Anticipating disruptive innovation (3 of many…)


Anticipating disruptive innovation is critical to any business. Today, disruptive innovation explains why: Salesforce.com, with its simple, internet-based system, is disrupting the leading providers of customer relationship management software such as Siebel systems Seiko watches disrupted Swiss watch manufacturers Coursera, with its online educational programs, is disrupting four-year colleges Today, I want to show how disruptive innovation goes about killing established companies.

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Defining innovation


I was talking to a friend today, and as we discussed innovation, she asked me a seemingly naïve question: “what’s innovation?” I realized that the term “innovation” is often used to describe very different things. It almost seems like anything qualifies as an innovation, making it difficult to understand what innovation really stands for at a fundamental level. And yet, as mature markets are…

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How to manage for disruptive innovation?


In a previous post, I mentioned that disruptive innovation fundamentally changes industry structure: it changes not only how value is created, but also who claims industry value. I’ve received many emails asking me to address the logical follow-up question: how does one manage for disruptive innovation? In other words, how would a CEO lead his/her firm to innovate disruptively?