Categories In english

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.

Categories In english

Anticipating disruptive innovation (2 of many…)


Last week, I introduced a pattern of disruptive innovation. My goal : anticipating disruptive innovation. This week and next week, I’ll illustrate how to anticipate disruptive by using a couple of graphs. Again, understanding why once leading companies in their industries got wiped by new entrants is critical to any business. This pattern of disruptive innovation explains why:

Categories In english

What is strategy? (1 of many…)


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…

Categories Creativity, In english

What’s the ideal innovation organization?


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…

Categories Creativity, In english

Want to save $52M in a few years? Try corporate creativity !


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…

Categories In english

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…

Categories In english

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?

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”.