711 Posts Found

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.

One of the things that give startups an advantage is that they’re exploring in a way that established companies aren’t able to. Enterprises have an innovation problem. Startups are exploratory. But what we have to realize is that the very act of setting a goal makes you become more and more enterprise-like. You stop exploring other avenues, strategies, products, and motions that you could be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Twain | Source: Brain Pickings | Subject: Innovation

New ventures often fail—but digital capabilities change the odds. By following a business-building playbook based on your company’s strategic assets, you can accelerate growth dramatically.

Content: Article | Authors: Austin Gispanski, Beth Viner, David Tang-Quan, James Tucker, Jürgen Eckel, Ketil Gjerstad, Sylvain Duranton, Yoichiro Hirai | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy

As soon as you take innovation seriously, you start having to throw up in the air so many of the things we learn in mainstream economics: unique equilibria, representative agents, perfect competition. Indeed, the mathematics that we’re taught in mainstream economics departments mainly comes from Newtonian physics. It allows nice, smooth curves to be drawn where there is a maximum point (important if firms are … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mariana Mazzucato | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Innovation

Five lessons for incumbents on how to build and scale new digital ventures—and increase their odds of success.

Content: Article | Authors: Nimal Manuel, Ralf Dreischmeier, Tomas Beerthuis, Tomas Laboutka | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management

The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved the problems. When someone says to me, “Well, you can’t do this for these reasons,” all it means is that there are problems to be solved. If they can be solved, the idea transitions into becoming a thing. If they can’t, it remains an idea.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jony Ive | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Worries about failure, criticism, and career impact hold back many people from embracing innovation. Here’s how to create a culture that accounts for the human side of innovation.

Content: Article | Authors: Alex Morris, Erik Roth, Laura Furstenthal | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Theories illuminate paths to value that might otherwise remain unseen. Managers and entrepreneurs who hold the flashlight of theory can avoid the streetlight effect—the human tendency to search only where the light already shines, where things are already evident.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alfonso Gambardella, Teppo Felin, Todd Zenger | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Innovation, Management

So often, we tell people to do out-of-the-box thinking. Then we stick them in the room and tell them to brainstorm. Well, brainstorming is a great way to share the knowledge that’s in the room. But it’s not out-of-the-box thinking. Out-of-the-box thinking requires you to search far and wide for how different industries and different people at different points in time have solved for analogous … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sheena Iyengar | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation