clair075

I was talking recently with a colleague who had been working in corporate innovation for quite some time.  He was discouraged because he felt his innovation activities were really insightful, and had resulted in a product offering that had great value for customers.  But in the end the business decided not to commercialize his idea. As we dissected the opportunity and the outcome, two issues became clear.  First, while the customer need was undeniable, eventually it proved to be outside of corporate direction and strategy.  The need was just far enough outside the bounds of what the company defined as its scope that he struggled to get executives to buy in.  While they had been happy to explore the market and need, they weren't convinced enough to enlarge their offerings. That decision was probably influenced by the second issue:  while the need was easily defined, the customers were dispersed and difficult to serve, and the business couldn't amount to more...

With apologies for the use of a tired phrase, there is a new game in town and it will dramatically impact how, why and where you do innovation work.  The new game, as demonstrated by a number of emerging disrupters, is captured in the book Unscaled and discussed at length in this nice blog post - one I wish I could have written. There are a couple of overlapping points here, but the main idea is that scale as a competitive weapon is increasingly passe.  As more and more of what we consume becomes virtual, scale doesn't matter.  As more and more of the supporting infrastructure (HR/IT/Finance/etc) can be acquired as a service, companies don't need to achieve scale to achieve profitability, or to crowd out other competitors.  Scale is giving way to agility, speed and customer experience.  We can see this playing out with firms like Uber and AirBnB, which are far smaller from a scale or headcount perspective from their competitors.  Size - at least the size o...

We've reached a couple of interesting milestones in a very short period of time, and it behooves us to pay attention to the changes in what has been an important industry - photography.  For innovators, it's been easy to kick Kodak around, for having missed the transition to digital photography while owning many of the patents.  However, Kodak by itself isn't the whole story in the world of photography. Today, Canon announced that it will no longer sell cameras that require film .  If the stories I've heard are true, they actually stopped making cameras that require film several years ago and have simply been selling off their inventory.  This of course follows on Kodak's decision to stop manufacturing film for most cameras, which occurred in 2009.  The rapid advance of technology Both Canon's exit and Kodak's exit from film are examples of the ever-accelerating pace of technology.  Canon has been manufacturing cameras for over 75 years, but the exit from t...