Innovation audit
Prescribing what the ecosystem needs not what it wants There are currently over 6,000 drugs approved by the FDA in the United States. You can only be bewildered if upon entering a doctor’s office and even before stating your symptoms, the medic hands you a prescription containing the most commonly prescribed drugs from the FDA […]
Why R&D Spending Is Not A Measure Of Innovation
Photographer: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg When it comes to R&D spending, corporate leaders often want to know what others are doing. How much are other companies in different industries spending on R&D? Leaders want to know the level of spending in absolute terms (i.e. total expenditure), and also as a percentage of revenue. The presumption is that […]
Five Principles for Building Corporate Innovation Ecosystems
It is undeniable that the world around us is changing. Technology and software have transformed large parts of business; and continues to do so in more and more dramatic ways. Corporate leadership would have to be in a special kind of denial to not see how these changes in technology and economics are impacting their […]
3 Reasons Why Practice Doesn’t Trump Theory
The Praxis Wheel. Art by Joshua Kahn Russell Over the last few years I have been traveling the world advising large companies on how to implement lean innovation methods within their companies. This work has led me to run innovation workshops, design innovation frameworks, work with management team on strategy and coach product teams in […]
The paradox of having no assets
The paradox of having no assets and it’s implication in corporate innovation strategy It is still paradoxically how, having less (or no) financial assets at their disposal, smaller organizations find developing innovative new business models being straightforward, where large corporations, with far more financial power, find the same activity to be costly. There are two main reasons […]
Creating Wealth by Creating Value aka Why We Do Lean Innovation
Over the last three years I have part of a great team working to bring lean innovation principles into Pearson, the world’s largest global education company with over 35 ooo employees. We have developed the Lean Product Lifecycle, which is Pearson’s framework for investment management and product development best practice. Last year, along with Adobe’s Kickbox, our […]
Frameworks for Building Innovation Portfolios
This article is the final draft of an earlier draft that I published to test out a unified framework combining McKinsey’s three horizons and Christensen Theory of Disruptive innovation. You can can find the original article here. Many thanks to those who gave feedback and helped me to refine my thinking. Elsewhere I have argued that large […]
A New Typology for Innovation That Combines The Three Horizons Framework And Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation?
I am wrote this article to invite criticism, comment and possible ridicule. My aspiration was to create a framework that combined the three horizons framework from McKinsey with Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. I came up with six types of innovation that were pretty lame and needed improving or scrapping. I published this ugly baby […]
Should innovation units be physically separate from the core business?
Most senior executives can relate. It usually starts with some startup types within the company telling them scary stories about how startups are coming to eat their lunch. Look at Facebook, Uber, Twitter and Airbnb! Oh, look what happened to Kodak , don’t let that happen here. Oh, look what happened to Blockbuster, don’t let that […]
A Lean Startup Definition of Innovation
In my previous post, I wrote about the false choices that innovators face. These choices seem to present teams with the option of using business plans to manage innovation or just doing it without a plan, and basing decisions on vision. Often customers are excluded from the process in both cases. And this ultimately leads to […]