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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Necrophone 