Innovation

William J. Holstein interviews Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan for the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt: Q. So would you say the chief executive has an important role in making breakthrough innovation possible? A. A tremendously important role. I consider the C.E.O.’s role in the modern corporation to be building the capacity to continuously innovate…

There’s a flurry of innovation talk from the old school business guard lately. Reading through it, it seems like those concerned with innovation are repeating ourselves, possibly because we’re not aware of what other work has been done and because we’re using discovery tools that aren’t revealing anything new. Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Bordia from Booz…

I just discovered Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought is online. It’s usefulness should be obvious from his introduction… Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC…

In response to David Hornik’s Bubble 2.0 I responded that it looks more like Bootstrap 1.0 to me. Scott blogged this topic a month ago… With customers using a working product, decisions about what type of additional capital will be needed to scale are much easier to frame. And if you do decide to approach…

We thought a lot about concept cars last year and how we could translate this practice to other industries. So it’s fun fun fun to hear the latest Steve Jobs metaphor… You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it…

Management Practices across Firms & Nations is a survey of management practices in over 700 firms in France, Germany, the UK and the US with interesting results and implications for innovation capabilities… …We also find a surprisingly large dispersion of management practices across firms with a long ‘tail’ of poorly managed firms. This presents a…

Dave Pollard laments that although everyone seems to agree innovation is important, few companies seem prepared to bring in someone professional to help them do it better. He offers four reasons for this: People don’t like to change. Everyone thinks they can do it themselves. It’s a ‘dragon’ issue, so it involves a lot of…

Gary Hamel parallels our thoughts on management innovation… Q: Why “management innovation”? A: There’s a hierarchy of innovation. Economic progress is driven by three forms of innovation: institutional innovation, which includes the legal and institutional framework for business; technological innovation, which creates the possibility of new products, services, and production methods; and management innovation, which…

I had a great conversation with Phi-Hong the other day about how despite our having seen the insights and risk management that user research can achieve, some companies seem to do just fine without it, thank you very much. Apple’s product design, the early Google, much of Amazon.com. While teaching others the product development process,…

Lawrence Lessig’s recent speech, Clearing the Air About Open Source actually focuses more on the war between innovators and those that profit by impeding innovation: lawyers, lobbyists, and the companies that employ them. He illustrates how the courts are used to litigate companies into bankruptcy, how companies like Microsoft are hiring boatloads of lawyers to…

Innovation sometimes springs from crisis: a company sees a dire threat and takes drastic steps to recover. But what if one person perceives this threat before it becomes obvious to the organization? Can this person manufacturer crisis to initiate change? It seems that’s what Thomas Friedman is doing with his book The World is Flat,…