Category Archives: Innovation

The Five Leading Trends in Intrapreneurship entering 2017

I was recently asked to deliver a keynote talk at the Intrapreneurship Conference in Silicon Valley last November.   The conference organizers kindly asked me to cover the leading trends in the field of Intrapreneurship, also known as Corporate Entrepreneurship.    To do the task justice, I sent out a wide survey and also interviewed a dozen clients as well as multi-industry

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The Purpose of the Corporation – New Rules

The purpose of the corporation is arguably two-fold:  To create customers, by making promises and to keep customers, by keeping promises.   The goal seems clear:  to win.   The question is, at what cost?  What are the rules of the game that determine a fair win?    Shouldn’t the modern corporation abide by a set of bylaws that maximize the benefits of

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The Brave New World of Corporate Venturing. Part III: Tugboat Venturing

In part I of this blog, I discussed the traditional corporate venturing models. These are several variants of corporate venturing activities than can be roughly categorized as Internal Ventures, Startup Partnering and Corporate Venture Capital. In part II of this blog, I discussed the emerging corporate venturing models, namely Collaborative Venturing and Sponsored Acceleration (aka Corporate Acceleration). The emerging models

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The Brave New World of Corporate Venturing. Part II: Emerging Models

In part I of this blog, I discussed the traditional corporate venturing models. These are several variants of corporate venturing activities than can be roughly categorized as Internal Ventures, Startup Partnering and Corporate Venture Capital.   The purpose of the CV models seem clear – help a corporation deal with a litany of value shifts and translate research and points of

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The Brave New World of Corporate Venturing. Part I: The Traditional Models

Every established organization must be willing and able to systemically deal with value shifts, or risk missing the next big thing.   Value shifts come in many shapes and forms, from consumer preferences, technology developments and competitive market dynamics.   Sometimes, organizations can anticipate, even create game-changing value shifts, other times, they can only realistically hope to notice shifts in time to

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Quirky is dead. Long live Quirky!

As you may have heard, crowd-sourced product developer Quirky has filed for bankruptcy, claiming its business model had scalability challenges (code word for losing money).   Quirky did achieve success by some measures, including $185 Million raised, over 400 products launched, over $100 Million in revenue, a connected-home spin-off (Wink) and several corporate partnerships with the likes of GE, Mattel and

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The world’s most creative business model strikes again

The Venture Creator business model has just received significant market validation.   The arguable leaders in this space, Boston’s PureTech Ventures & Allied Minds recently raised approximately $200 Million each through their respective IPO’s on the London Stock Exchange.   Both companies continue to grow their impressive portfolio of big bets through their value-creation formula of spotting opportunities traditional VC’s seem to

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Shift Happens. It’s How You Deal That Matters.

For whatever reason, corporate innovation has become synonymous with new business development – but that isn’t the only way to sense for change and encourage the bold and aggressive innovation that today’s world needs from large corporations, idling on the sidelines of cash while the very real game of human happiness sputters. Taking a step back, most agree with the

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Drucker on Innovation Opportunities

Since everyone else seems to be revisiting Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation these days, the contrarian that I like to be.. I’d like to revisit Drucker – in a positive way. Still the most renowned and cited management consultant in recent times, the Austrian Peter Drucker, offered a radical view of business endeavors.   He claimed the purpose of a business

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Time for a Total Innovation System

My days as a practitioner and student of Lean Production at AutoEuropa (VW) and MIT taught me a simple, but valuable lesson – “It’s the System, Stupid” All the different components of ‘how to do more with less’ were available (production efficiency and reliability, quality, supplier integration, employee involvement, etc.) – Toyota was the first to put them all under one

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