Category Archives: Strategy

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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Enter The Dragon

Enter The Dragon was a landmark movie in many ways – It was the first Hollywood-Asian Kung-Fu production, it was Bruce Lee’s last completed movie (he died weeks before the official release), and it featured a never before seen diverse cast of heroes including Bruce, John Saxon and Jim Kelly.   After Enter The Dragon, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting.  The movie

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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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Disruptive Innovation in Molecular Diagnostics – IQuum

In my previous blog series, Strategic Planning for New Ventures, I showcased an example of a disruptive innovator in Veracyte, leader in thyroid cancer diagnostics.   Veracyte pursues the specialized CLIA lab business model, offering a unique, high-value test that cannot be obtained elsewhere. In this blog, I profile another innovator, IQuum, which is pursuing the other common model in molecular

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Yes you CAN sell ice to Eskimos – Part III: Our Advanced Needs

This three part blog series introduces a novel classification of innate user needs, aka ‘the basic ways we fight for happiness and progress (through consumption)’.  Part I of the blog recapped the well known concept that market segmentation is not about demographics, but about seizing an unoccupied space in the mind and heart of the consumer.   Part II of the

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Yes you CAN sell ice to Eskimos – Part II: Our Primal Needs

In Part I of this blog, I introduced the age-old secret of entrepreneurship – understanding the essence of what you’re really selling, i.e. defining the intrinsic quality of your product or service that compels your customers to want it.   This is also referred to as the ‘value proposition’ or ‘deep meaning’ of any particular offering, elucidating the reason ‘why’ someone

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Yes you CAN sell ice to Eskimos – Part I

My first ever (ad)venture was selling books door-to-door.   Back during my college years at LSU, I badly needed to make money during the summer breaks to pay for the mounting costs of a higher education (and too much partying).   Little did I know that my summer job was to be the real education – my door-to-door sales experience is where

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A Winning Growth Strategy: Platform Thinking

The Platypus is one of the world’s most amazing creatures, with an almost impossible combination of  mammal, reptile and bird DNA and features – what other amphibious, furry animal is capable of electro-detection, poisonous stinging, laying eggs, and waddling like a duck? Platypus means “Flat Foot”.   The Platypus is nature’s Plug & Play, a prime example of Platform or “Flat

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Strategic Planning for New Ventures. Part III: The Strategic Choice Canvas

Based on your assessment of the current situation facing your startup or innovation project discussed in my last blog post, the Gut Check (including a good grasp of the past and changing conditions ahead), it is time to put your core idea and inertia through the strategy ringer, or a set of decision-making criteria that should improve your prospects for

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Strategic Planning for New Ventures. Part II: The Gut Check

In part I of this blog, I covered various views on strategy, namely the distinction between strategy as a theory for competition and strategy as the realization of goals by all means necessary.   We learned from the brilliant work of various though leaders including Porter, Christensen, Hamel, McGrath, Blank and Drucker that the formula for victory on the business battleground

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