clair075

At this point in business evolution, every CEO understands the need for more innovation.  After a decade of reading about it, getting pounded over the head with the Jobs/Apple story and watching new innovations disrupt entire industries, businesses are starting to react.  More and more of them are doing innovation, with drastically different outcomes.  Some are successful.  Many are making significant investments and have had little success.  Some are frankly abject failures.  What I constantly fail to understand is why innovation is treated so cavalierly, with so little regard for planning and integration to strategy.  In many cases it's as if executives throw up their hands and succumb to the idea that innovation is black magic. Innovation does require creativity and expansive thinking.  It requires divergent thinking and exploration, the willingness to explore customer needs and market trends.  It can require creating new products or servi...

We tend to be very short sighted, we corporate executives.  Our lifespans are relatively brief, all things considered.  There are over 240 years since the founding of the United States, and using a 20 year cycle for generations that suggests approximately 12 generations of people during that brief window.  Most of us work for approximately 40 years, but we rarely consider the events or recent history before we started working.  In fact there's very little rationale to think about history in many cases, except for some hoary old stories about the founding of a company and its emergent culture.  Most of our waking, productive time is focused on the now, the current quarter, the next quarter, because that's what we are evaluated on, compensated for.  There's little time to worry about what might happen in the future, and even less time to worry about what happened in the recent past. It's this lack of context and historical appreciation that makes innovation s...

I'm a big fan of Geoffrey Moore's work on Crossing the Chasm, which is the idea that every market can be divided into segments: very early technology adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards.   It's clear from history that there are always people who will adopt a new idea or technology even while others think it is unfinished or even risky.  The vast majority will wait until the technology becomes a "whole product" and "crosses the chasm" according to Moore.  This means that instead of just a technology, the offering is now complete, with supporting services, information and support. As a new technology matures and people become familiar with its uses, and the technology is simplified and becomes part of a solution, more and more people adopt the technology.  Any student of history can tell you this, and we believe it is a natural order - almost a requirement: first a technology or capability is discovered Adventuresome people use it ...

You may know that Paul Hobcraft and I are collaborating on a new blog entitled Ecosystems for Innovating where we focus on the emerging importance of platforms and ecosystems for innovation.  We've been exploring the idea that increasingly innovators must understand the ecosystems of products, services and business models that exist.  New innovations must either align to and integrate with, or must overthrow these platforms and ecosystems.  It's simply not possible to create a compelling new innovation that ignores existing platforms and ecosystems, unless that innovation also creates a completely new ecosystem. We're making these arguments based on another idea:  seamless customer experience .  As basic product and feature needs are increasing met and in many cases exceeded, what customers want is products and services that work together effectively, cohesively and seamlessly.  New solutions or innovations must inter-operate seamlessly with the ecosystem....