What is strategy? In the last five years, I’ve spoken to approximately 500 executives in Fortune 500 companies in the United States and Europe. One of the things that struck me most is that everybody seems to have their own definition of what strategy means. I guess this is positive because it shows that the question is on everybody’s mind prompting everybody to formulate…
The GE Global innovation barometer reports that business leaders, growing uneasy with the continuing changing dynamics of today’s business landscape and uncertain about the path forward, are looking at innovation to secure growth. Recently, I was talking to William Taranto, President of Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund. Among the many topics we discussed, we wondered what would be the ideal innovation organization: what roles…
Raising firm’s competitiveness is on everyone’s mind: policy makers are looking for ways to create better conditions for firms while senior executives are looking for ways to beat competition. Some believe that lowering labor costs ought to boost competitiveness; others believe that raising trade barriers is the answer. In this post, I want to show that corporate creativity, a form of innovation where employees are…
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…
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?
Last week I gave a conference at a company’s Open Innovation Fair. There were General Managers, Country Heads, CTOs and Business Unit Heads from multiple Fortune 500 EU companies that were attending the fair. Before I started out, the CTO of a prominent German company was asked what was the most significant challenge to innovation. He replied instantly: “building an innovation-friendly culture”.
The term “strategic innovation” has often a fuzzy meaning. It’s used to mean important innovation, or urgent innovation. Sometimes, “strategic innovation” may refer to C-level innovation projects. Each of these terms provide a shed of light on the meaning of “strategic innovation”, but they fail to answer a more fundamental question on the purported strategic nature of innovation. In other words, what is it…