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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If there were ever a mythological role model of entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship, it would definitely be Prometheus. Prometheus is the trickster Titan that created man and woman from clay. He is best known for defiantly stealing fire from the Olympian God Zeus and gifting it to his beloved mankind, for which he was condemned to eternal suffering; The irate Zeus
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In Part I of this blog, I covered five common inhibitors to corporate entrepreneurship, namely: Lack of time Lack of connections Lack of CE skills (& context to learn them) Lack of executive visibility & resources Flawed risk/reward ratio and or misconceptions In Part II I introduce a programmatic example on how to deal with the above challenges – An
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Companies realize that they don’t innovate – their employees innovate. Companies are thus earnestly preaching: ‘Innovation is everyone’s job”! While the employees themselves want to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, they face five major structural inhibitors in attempting to do so (that only the most gifted, networked and experienced corporate entrepreneurs can overcome – unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them
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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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I’m often asked the question “What is more important to corporate innovation or external financial investors – an idea that’s Magical (appeals to their creative or emotional side) or an idea that’s Logical (appeals to their critical reasoning, rational side)”? It reminds me of the question posed by Niccolo Machievelli in ‘The Prince’: Is it better for a ruler to
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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 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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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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Necrophone 