What the diagnostics business can teach us about innovation investment decisions. There are easy businesses and there are hard businesses. Then there are REALLY HARD businesses. If you ask me (and I’m living it now in my current startup, Biological Dynamics), the hardest business of all is medical diagnostics, especially for initial disease screening (is the patient healthy or
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In their book “The Startups Owner’s Manual” authors Steven Gary Blank and Bob Dorf argue that almost everything we know about taking products to market is wrong! How’s that for an opening statement!? They go on to illustrate how the world of new product introduction is littered with failures, mostly because companies (including startups) are using the wrong new business
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In his book “Design-Driven Innovation. Changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean” author Roberto Verganti argues that truly ground-breaking innovation happens when leaders propose a new vision to the market that is made possible by a new technology, but most importantly, how it changes the underlying meaning (or the ‘why?’) of a certain activity. He
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This essay covers the dilemma of making a timely decision while considering enough options for the essence of your business concept. If you are in the early stages of a new venture, I can only hope you find yourself in a roller coaster, land of confusion – too much certainty at the onset would personally make me nervous. “What’s the
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Taking a page from Lean Production (the rigorous scientific-like management practices used by Industrial Engineers since the day of mass production, coupled with a heavy dose of Japanese-management style employee engagement), the Lean Startup movement has taken the entrepreneurship world by storm – finally providing a playbook to make a system out of winning in what has previously seamed like
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In his book “The Nature of Technology” author W. Brian Arthur (formerly of PARC and the Santa Fe Institute) provides a bold theory for the evolution of technology. He defines technology in several ways, the first being “The means to fulfill a human purpose”. He sees technology as a tool that people can use to solve problems, implying that each
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When Christopher Columbus ‘pitched’ Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon to fund his golden voyage west bound to India, what do you think was the nature of the opportunity? Here’s one way to think about it. First, think about the ‘Prize’ – What was the intended prize for the second Iberian power (Portugal being first at the
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What happened to Blackberry? Case of…”you panic, you copy, you die” – Understand why people buy our product before you copy someone else’s – The smartphone went to the consumer mainstream – consumers didn’t want productivity, they wanted ‘superpowers’, aka Apps and ‘aspirational’ design – doesn’t mean you abandon your corporate base nor refuse to change your business model to
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When John Osher, a serial entrepreneur, was looking to expand his SpinPop Lollypop business, he went ‘prospecting’ with his team. They paced up and down supermarket aisles looking for gaps in product categories where they could apply their core technology, a small electric motor that would cause a consumer product to spin. During one of their prospecting missions, they noticed
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If you love entrepreneurship, you’ve also gotta love or at least appreciate strategy. Every winning business venture is founded on solid strategy (whether or not the entrepreneur actually knows it or not, which is sort of ironic). But for us innovation management practitioners, the goal is to demystify the innovation ‘black box’ and notice the underlying patterns that lead to
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Necrophone 