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 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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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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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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When the American auto industry desperately needed help in the 1980’s to catch up to foreign competition, namely from Japan, it essentially followed the motto: ”If you can’t beat them, join them.” Unconditionally, American auto companies gradually adopted a management philosophy that came to be known as “Lean Production” to improve competitiveness in operations, from logistics to manufacturing and sales.
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An auto legend goes to hippie heaven After an amazing 56 years, the VW Kombi (Camper) will no longer be produced – If you’re in Brazil, you can still get a limited edition (perfect world cup limo service)
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When formulating a new venture, consider the bond between invention and business model discipline – aka, Innovation. The birth of the Ford Motor Company story serves as a prime example. How many of you have ever heard of James Couzens? Without James Couzens, you probably would not have heard of Henry Ford. James Couzens completed Henry Ford. Ford, the visionary
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