Business Plan or Just Do It – This Innovator’s Choice Is A False Narrative
Innovation is hard work. Creating great products that succeed on the market is a really difficult endeavor. You can ask any startup founder. But my experience so far has taught me that innovation in large successful companies is even harder work. Innovators working in these companies are often faced with a lack of urgency that […]
How To Manage Innovation Without Business Plans
The Fallacy of Planning (Part Three) This is the third and final post in a series posts about the limitations of using business planning to manage innovation. My first post argued that most large companies have processes that deny investment in ideas that are presented without a business plan. The argument I was trying to make was […]
Five Reasons Why Business Plans Don’t Work for Innovation
This is a follow-up on my last post on business plans which argued that most large companies have processes designed to deny investment in new product ideas, if these ideas are proposed without business plans. My argument was that these processes hinder innovation, even as the company is training its employees to become more agile and use […]
You Have NO Business Plan? How Could We Possibly Invest?
Steve Blank likes to joke that the two groups of people that require five year plans are Venture Capitalists and the Soviet Union. I would like to add a third group to that list, large successful companies. In order to get funding within a large corporation for any new idea you have to complete a […]
How Large Companies Can Act Like Startups
In a previous post on this topic, I argued that large companies are not startups, nor should they strive to be. My argument was based on the reality that, unlike startups, large companies tend to have products and services that are already successful in the marketplace. As Steve Blank puts it, the distinction between startups […]
What Disruption Looks Like
Much has been written about the changing landscape in the business of education. Christensen’s Disrupting Class is a great book, so is Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. There are also several articles highlighting the increasing investments in the EdTech space which have grown over 503% in the last five […]
Large Companies Are Not Startups…
Nor should they strive to be. In fact, most startups want to become successful companies. It might be cool to be a founder, but very few people want to live in that trough of sorrow forever. The Lean Startup movement has been great for startup ecosystems. It has resulted in some of the best thinking in a […]