clair075

You've heard it before - the pace of change is accelerating.  I can present all of the technology adoption charts , the fascinating nuggets of data that tell you how quickly different products or technologies were acquired by millions of customers.  And so on and so on. You already know this.  Change is real, and change is accelerating.  Whether we are talking about change in your global markets, in your industry or in your customer base, change is everywhere.  The real question isn't: should we change?  The answer to that question is obvious.  The question isn't even:  should we become more agile or more nimble?  The answer to that one is "yes" as well, and (shameless plug) I wrote a book about how to become more nimble, agile and innovative . Look at just one of my favorite data nuggets:  how long it took specific products or technologies to reach 50M users . Please go ahead, the rest of the blog can wait.  Having seen this, we ca...

So we come to the ultimate post on explore and exploit, at least for now.  In past posts we've looked at the origin of explore and exploit , the emergence of true innovation explorers like Edison, Bell and a host of others.  We've noticed the rise of the corporation to exploit the discoveries of said explorers.  Last but not least we touched on the future of explore and exploit and how it might upset existing business models and organizational structures. With all of this insight, we must ask:  how can a business win as the explore:exploit model continues to change?  Herewith, some of the answers.  How might we win as the explore:exploit model changes? We've examined the fact that existing business models place far more emphasis on exploiting existing ideas than they do on discovering new ones.  Much of the last 30 years of management thought has been consumed with improving exploitation skill - Six Sigma, Lean, Outsourcing and right-sizing are all ef...

In my last two posts I examined the origin of explore and exploit , and where it has taken us so far in the innovation space.  In this post I want to explore why everything we believe about explore and exploit from a strategic and business model perspective is increasingly wrong, and what innovators and strategists need to do now in order to compete effectively in the future. In the first two posts I've made the case that the relative investments in explore and exploit and the way we think about them have been shaped by our historical experiences and this has also colored how we structure our strategies and business models today.  The Spanish exploration and ultimate exploitation of South America proved a good model - an inexpensive exploration mostly outsourced to third parties led to a massively profitable exploitation for centuries.  Over time the players changed but the model didn't.  Eccentric innovators and inventors took the place of nautical explorers and ma...

If you are following along, I'm writing a series of posts about the opportunities and challenges with the way we think about and implement the concepts behind explore and exploit.  In my first post I wrote a short introduction to the topic.  In that post I looked at the history of exploring and exploiting, which I'll suggest comes from the conquest of the new world by the Spaniards, when Columbus and others explored, and the Spanish government exploited the opportunity for centuries. Skipping ahead through history If we fast forward from Columbus to say Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, we can see that the explorers were still relatively few, eccentric outsiders who were scientists or people bent on geographic or scientific discovery.  In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were even competitions between explorers.  There was the "race" to the poles.  Teams from several countries raced through blinding snow and ice to get to the North and South pole first....

In so many ways it often feels like innovation is both wholly new, and ancient at the same time.  Tools that we use to innovate aren't new, in fact many are very old, but put to appropriate use they help us create miraculous new things.  Too often we distrust old tools or methods, thinking that newer tools or methods are more current, more viable, but fail to realize that some things are simply grounded in truth, no matter hold old they are. Take, for example, the idea of exploring and exploiting.  These are the "yin and yang" of corporate America today.  But they aren't new.  Companies and even countries have been exploring and exploiting for centuries.  We extol the idea of the ambidextrous corporation as if this is new insight, when in reality being able to do both exploration and exploitation well has been a key success factor for decades if not centuries.  I think increasingly we are going to hear more and more about exploring and exploiting as a ...