When working for a large company, I remember the arduous, but necessary process of yearly strategic planning, albeit I wasn’t personally invited to the swanky off-site or wherever “the generals gathered in their masses”. Now that I’m part of the management team of an early-stage biotech startup, I get invited to the party – yeah! Then it dawned on me
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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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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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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 