Rudy Ruggles

“Our” stories are more effective (authentic) than “their” or even “my” stories.

Rudy Ruggles

Experience enables people to understand and internalize ideas.

IMR3: Strategic Exploration Event Report

May 22nd, 2002 saw the start of the third Innovation Management Roundtable (IMR). Coming from across the US and across the ocean, innovation leaders from organizations as diverse as BMW and the U.S. Navy gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts to learn and apply new ideas about innovation. The theme of this IMR was “Strategic Exploration,” focusing on how organizations can more effectively search for and identity … [ Read more ]

Intangibles Impact on IPO Success (research findings)

A recent study of US IPOs from 1986 through early 2000, conducted by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, found that “new economy” firms that promoted the use of non-financial measures did worse when evaluated by those same measures. This compounds their well-documented failure to provide meaningful financial returns and confirms the importance of identifying, measuring, and disclosing appropriate intangible value drivers.

Furthermore, the study found that … [ Read more ]

Richard Pascale

The seductive pull of equilibrium poses a constant danger to successful established companies.

…While equilibrium endangers living systems, it often wears the disguise of an attribute. Equilibrium is concealed inside strong values or a coherent, close-knit social system, or within a company’s well-synchronized operating system (often referred to as “organizational fit”). Vision, values, and organizational fit are double-edged swords.

Alan Kay

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Missing Markets: Strategies for Exploring the World’s Biggest Neglected Business Opportunites (.pdf)

An interesting summary and framework for the issues that arose from a group gathering at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation to discuss “missing markets.” The paper offers a systematic method for identifying missing markets, analyzing what would be required to provide those markets, and evaluating the consequences.

John Rawls (American philosopher)

Isn’t a fair social system the one that we would pick if we didn’t know ahead of time what our role will be?

Eric Chen

Ultimately, companies are like people, in that what they forget is essential for determining what they remember.

Biology-Inspired Software: Metaphor, Mechanism, and Meaning (.pdf)

For at least thousands of years, humans have looked to nature for inspiration for technology. It’s hard not to look at birds and wish you could fly, too. This thought hasn’t escaped computer scientists (well, not the part about flying), and within the last few years there has been a surge of interest in looking to biology for help in answering some of the pressing … [ Read more ]

Richard Farson (psychologist) / David McIntosh

Although people profess to learn from their mistakes, their behavior is shaped by their successes. This is why change is hard for people. Confronted with failure, or with a new world where the old tricks aren’t working any more, most people keep doing what they have been doing, only harder.

Manfred Kets de Vries

There are few universals in life, but transference is one. What transference says is that no relationship we have is a new relationship; all relationships are colored by previous relationships.

Dynamic Pricing Models: Opportunity for Action

The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation has researched more than 60 new business drivers and examined more than 50 company examples to determine which dynamic pricing model best supports the external environment and business strategy of a particular business. From this extensive research they have developed a dynamic pricing methodology for successful pricing. This white paper provides an overview of … [ Read more ]

Community Innovation and the Aspiring Innovator (.pdf)

The focus of this Just Thinking piece is that an organization implementing an innovation process needs to understand the dynamic and evolving nature of organizational behavior and culture. Too often, innovation processes fail to recognize that companies change, learn, and improve with time. As a result, the solutions are static. This Just Thinking will help to clarify how a company can migrate, over time, towards … [ Read more ]