BLOG ON INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION
Tools and strategies to innovate, solve complex issues, and transform businesses
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Predicting the ROI of Innovation
Anyone involved in corporate innovation will face the challenge of “selling innovation” to the executive team and/or the Board of Directors. The question of the return on investment (ROI) of innovation just keeps popping up. And still no one seems to have cracked it yet.
Indeed, predicting the ROI of innovation can feel like threading a needle in the dark. But while pinpoint precision is out of our grasp, could there be a way to calculate a rough order of magnitude ROI of innovation?
In this article I want to shed light on two essential frameworks and two critical data points that could transform your perspective on innovation ROI.
Books that most influenced my work in 2023
In this post I reflect on the most useful books - loosely connected to strategy and innovation - I read in 2023.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
Do not let fear of failure stifle corporate innovation
In this blogpost I highlight a few simple ideas that can go a long way to reducing the fear of failure that stifle corporate innovation in large organisations.
Tackling that challenge will require first a deep awareness of the problem and then the use of two simple frameworks to help anyone within an organisation identify where and when failure would be safe.
Why is innovation more important than ever?
In my introduction to the Corporate Innovation in Action conference, l shared my experience on why large organisations innovate and my convictions on why innovation is more important than ever today.
You can watch the recording here.
Books that most influenced my work in 2022
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on strategy and innovation I read in 2022.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
What changes when you start scaling?
A lack of awareness and readiness can seriously hinder the ability of corporate innovators and scale-up leaders to successfully scale their new venture in an incumbent business.
In this blogpost I highlight how leaders of scale-ups should get ready for and adapt to two major changes in the scaling phase:
Shifting their Business Model focus,
Rethinking the Operating Model.
What you should know about innovation’s time to impact
When leaders turn for help on innovation, the last thing they want to hear is that transformative innovation’s time to impact is unpredictable and long. Still it is important to manage leaders’ expectations early on, if only to give transformative innovation the best chance of success.
Let me explain in this post what I believe all leaders should know about innovation’s time to impact and how to overcome the longer time to impact of transformative innovation.
Books that most influenced my work in 2021
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on strategy and innovation I read in 2021.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
What drives leaders to invest in transformative innovation?
If you plan to introduce or increase the volume on transformative innovation in your organisation, expect pushback to say the least. Still, some leaders manage to overcome all obstacles.
In this article I want to highlight three powerful drivers behind the success of leaders who managed to create a capability for transformative innovation within their organisation.
So what drives leaders to invest in transformative innovation?
Fear of disruption
Hunger for growth
Awareness of an unforeseeable future
You can’t pick the winners at the start, in transformative innovation… and pro basketball!
The hindsight bias leads to overconfidence regarding our ability to predict the outcomes of future events. In the field of innovation, this often causes leaders to invest in the wrong ideas.
In this post I show how leaders who want transformative innovation outcomes should start by acknowledging the hindsight bias, and accept that “they can’t pick the winners at the start”.
Books that most influenced my work in 2020
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on innovation and business transformation I read in 2020.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
Innovation Inception: three ideas that unlock innovation in the minds of leaders
In this post I highlight the three fundamental ideas that leaders need to make their own to unleash the transformative innovation potential of their organisations:
1. Exploration is fundamentally different from exploitation,
2. There are different types of innovation: efficiency, sustaining and transformative,
3. To achieve more transformative innovation, you need to bring more volume into your innovation portfolio.
How to unlock better innovation outcomes with the 3 types of innovation framework
In a previous post I explained that, to bring clarity to any conversation on innovation, you need to distinguish between three different types of innovation, heavily borrowed from Harvard professor Clayton Christensen: efficiency, sustaining, and transformative innovation.
In this post I highlight 3 more use cases where the 3 types of innovation framework unlocks radically better innovation outcomes in large organisations by helping to:
Provide better innovation guidance
Assess the balance of an innovation portfolio
Check alignment of a portfolio with expectations
What type of innovation are you talking about?
People often misunderstand each other when they talk about innovation.
In this post I explain how Corporate Innovation Leaders can use the 3 types of innovation framework to bring clarity to their communication on innovation.
How to take The Guesswork Out of Innovation
In innovation and exploration, it is crucial to measure whether you are reducing the risk and uncertainty of new business ideas before you invest big and scale. In this blogpost I introduce the 4 innovation metrics you need to track on very innovation project to take the guesswork out of innovation. RISK, POTENTIAL, TIME and COST.
Three New Tools You Need to Master to Build an Invincible Company
In this article, I introduce three innovation tools that executives and corporate innovation leaders can use to better manage innovation in a large organization: the Strategic Guidance framework, the Portfolio Map and the Culture Map.
How to Use Patterns to Shift an Outdated Business Model to a More Competitive One
No business model can live forever. In this post I show how business model patterns can help executives and innovation teams think through how to substantially improve their current business model by shifting it from a less competitive to a more competitive one.
How to use Business Model patterns to build more resilient businesses
The most successful business models build on patterns, i.e. repeatable configurations of different business model building blocks to strengthen an organization’s overall business model. This is the secret formula behind their success. In this post I introduce the library of business model patterns that we developed in The Invincible Company. And I explain how understanding those patterns helps entrepreneurs and business leaders create better, more resilient businesses.
Books that most influenced my work in 2019
In this blogpost I reflect on the most useful books on innovation and business transformation I read in 2019.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
How to keep momentum after a Hack day?
"How to keep momentum after a Hack day?" she asked me. This post summarises my answer to the CIO of an ASX 100 manufacturing company.
To keep momentum after a hack day you need to:
1. Be clear on your purpose.
2. Assess your innovation readiness.
3. Identify the two improvement areas with highest leverage.
4. Act on them!