720 Posts Found

An intelligent failure is an undesired result in new territory. There’s no way you can know for sure whether it will work out without trying it. […] An intelligent failure differs from two other types of failures: a basic failure, which is caused by carelessness or ignorance, and a complex failure, which is caused by multiple factors, none of which would have caused the failure … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Amy Edmondson | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Risk Management, Success / Failure

A big part of innovation is saying, “You know what I’m really sick of?” … “What am I really sick of?” is where innovation begins.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jerry Seinfeld | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Innovation

Fractal innovation enables large companies to be more responsive to customer needs, leverage their global scale, and set the pace for their competition. Multinationals often face strong competition in geographies where nimble, local companies are able to succeed by meeting the changing demands of local customers with speed, responsiveness, and innovation.

• Large companies face two main innovation challenges: They have a limited understanding of the

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Saurabh Chhajer, Sharad Verma | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Innovation, International, Management, Strategy

Models, concepts, and frameworks offer approaches to innovation, with varying success, and those who have pursued innovation attribute their successes and failures to varying levers. Is it possible, then, to get to the heart of what spurs creativity and innovation in a company?

We think it is, but what is there is anything but logical. We have observed 10 factors that play a significant role in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Himanshu Saxena | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Innovation

What makes a high-performing innovation team is a diversity of perspectives and experiences, but in a psychologically safe space so that team members can actually share openly, come up with a common vocabulary, and look at the problem through very different lenses.

Content: Quotation | Author: Erik Roth | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Line up 30 meetings with potential customers before you write a single line of code. You get much better at your pitch after the first five meetings. After the first 10, you start to see patterns. After 20, you really understand segmentation of the market. After 30, you have a really good understanding of what it is that you actually need to go build.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Sippey | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

When you can understand and articulate your customers’ goals and struggles and anxieties in simple, precise language, your developers and product teams will not have to guess at what to build.

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation

A great innovator knows when something that’s being asserted is actually an assumption. Understanding the difference is important, because when you’re dealing with a certainty, you’re less likely to challenge it. It’s an assertion, and, therefore, you may follow it blindly and it may run you into a ditch. A great innovator will treat that same statement as an assumption, which lets them respond differently. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erik Roth | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

Innovation, at its simplest, is identifying a valuable problem to solve, using a technology to solve that problem, and putting it inside a business model that allows it to scale as quickly as possible to create value. If you have that mental model in mind, how easy or difficult is it for those pieces to come together end to end in your organization? We often … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erik Roth | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

Agile initiatives have proven highly effective in teaching teams how to build but not nearly as effective in teaching teams what to build.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Allison Bailey, Amanda Luther, Charles Gildehaus, David Allred, Sesh Iyer | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Innovation, Management

For organizations to truly innovate and grow, leaders in every role and at every organizational level must be attuned to how they are creating new value while simultaneously protecting existing value. Just as a soccer coach must simultaneously pursue both scoring and defending, leaders must constantly focus their attention on opportunities to create value — through innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation — and to protect value … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David A. Hofmann, John J. Sumanth | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

If you want to maximize someone’s satisfaction with a choice, don’t give them unlimited options. Instead, as my colleagues and I have shown, you should give them some choice but with clear constraints. This added structure is crucial for picking a desired option with confidence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

While history would like you to believe breakthroughs are the result of genius inspiration, or divine intervention, the truth is far more prosaic. Whether it’s the invention of basketball or an organization-wide system for learning and innovation, our greatest minds have arrived at their Eureka! moments by way of clever choosing. That is, they identified their big problem, broke it down into several subproblems, searched … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Public companies are often not set up for innovation, partly because their compensation systems tend to be short-term-oriented and because the boards aren’t deeply enough involved in innovation. […] We’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the past 20 years, but a lot of it has come from younger, newer companies. Despite all the talent, capital, and customer knowl­edge established corporations have, there … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

Disruption creates both winners and losers. And you can only be one of the winners if you can see both sides of the coin—and are able not just to avoid the challenges, but also to envision and decisively embrace the potential opportunities within strategic risks. For most organizations, getting there requires a reboot of how they think about and evaluate risk. For example, instead of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alan Iny, Elton Parker, Jeanne Kwong Bickford, Nick D’Intino | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Innovation, Risk Management

Product management has experienced at least two significant waves of change in the last couple of decades. The first wave was the shift from on-prem infrastructure to cloud, which allowed product managers to shift from requirement-getters to product visionaries developing minimum viable products.

The second wave was driven by the consumerization of technology, which led PMs to be more anchored in design thinking, make data-driven product … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Harrysson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Management

We all want possibility, transformation, change, and innovation, but the only way to get to that is through uncertainty. If we want those things, we need to get better at navigating uncertainty as individual leaders, as teams, and as organizations. Organizations need to ask themselves, “Do we have the ability to face uncertainty? What is our uncertainty ability?” I believe uncertainty ability is like a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

If we only focus on the monetary barriers to adopting a product, we miss out on a lot. There are also time, effort and energy costs — ones that we are often unaware of. Consider when the real cost of change occurs in a transaction, and solve for that uncertainty.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

We have not found a single market where customer needs are homogenous. Yet, time and time again, companies design products for the average customer.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Georg Tacke, Madhaven Ramanujam | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Marketing / Sales

Sometimes (often, actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Subjects: Innovation, Management | Company: Amazon.com Inc.