BLOG ON INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION
Tools and strategies to innovate, solve complex issues, and transform businesses
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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.
My 2021 writing year in review
From the trenches of strategy and innovation, I brought back the material for a few more blogposts and articles that all aim to share learnings that can be useful to others.
In this blogpost you can find the links to:
14 posts for the Strategyzer blog or my personal blog,
An article for Raiffeisen INSIDE, Raiffeisen Bank International magazine, on how “culture enables innovation”,
A StratChat webinar on “Developing an Innovation Ecosystem from Scratch with Sergey Zverev from MSD”.
Are your leaders also ready to lead innovation?
In my experience, almost all organisations assume that their existing leaders are ready to lead innovation. But that assumption is often wrong.
In this blogpost I explain how to help leaders be better prepared to lead innovation. It starts by creating time and space for leaders to reflect on innovation, and via a dialogue create the opportunity to:
raise their awareness on the radical difference between exploration and exploitation,
make explicit their role in supporting and challenging innovation teams,
make explicit their role in designing and nurturing an innovation ecosystem.
The first 18 months of leading the creation of an Innovation Ecosystem
What would you do if you were asked to lead the launch of the new innovation arm within a large organisation? Nick Himowicz and I interviewed Sergey Zverev who faced this exact challenge in Feb 2020.
In this blogpost we summarise Sergey's 6 priorities in his first 18 months of leading the development of an innovation ecosystem within MSD emerging markets.
How to choose the best possible design for your innovation organisation today?
I have seen interest for organisational design in the context of innovation grow significantly in the last few months. Leaders have come to me with questions such as: Should corporate innovation be centralised or decentralised? How much separation is required from the core business? Should corporate innovation be in a separate legal entity?
In this blogpost I want to explain my approach to finding the best possible organisational design for innovation in a company, starting with the questions I typically ask, and how I then lay out the options to facilitate org design decisions.
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
The road from Tackers to Thinkers50
I learnt recently that Alex, Yves, Alan and myself have been shortlisted for the 2021 Strategy Award for our work on The Invincible Company.
I wish I could say that I had never hoped for such recognition… but that would not be entirely true!
In this blogpost I want to tell the story of my 5-year journey from Tackers 2016 to Thinkers50 and express gratitude to the exceptional people in my life who helped me along the way.
Experimentation is your path to growth!
Large organisations won’t be able to tackle 21st century business challenges without a strong experimentation capability.
In this blogpost I explain why experimentation is so critical to manage the high uncertainty of new business ideas, what the iterative innovation process looks like, and how experimentation unlocks value creation in terms of new products, services and business models.
Leadership support for innovation needs more than good intentions
Despite their best intentions, attempts by senior leaders in large organisations to set up a thriving innovation capability can end up in bitter disappointment.
In this blogpost I outline the five acts of a CORPORATE INNOVATION drama I’ve seen unfold too many times, and what leaders can put in place to create a virtuous circle towards better outcomes from innovation.
Two Questions to Gauge the Importance of Corporate Innovation in any Organisation
How to quickly assess the state of corporate innovation in any organisation?
In this blogpost I explain how to use two simple questions to leaders as a good predictor of how important innovation is considered in any organisation.
Use those questions before you can do a more detailed assessment.
Interview on Innovation Ecosystems
In this interview I answer all the questions from my fellow Strategyzer Advisor Christian Doll on innovation ecosystems, a critical topic to build long-term resilience in large organisations.
An Example from the Pharma Industry on How To Build a Thriving Innovation Ecosystem
It takes time and investment to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem, and it requires many decisions along the way.
In this post I show how a Pharma company I’m working with is balancing their short-term and long-term objectives as they navigate their way to building a thriving innovation ecosystem.
The 3 Elements of an Innovation Ecosystem
Developing an innovation capability within a large organization is a daunting prospect. It’s become clear in the last few years that it requires a more systemic approach.
In this post I explain the three core elements required to build an innovation ecosystem: explore portfolio + innovation programs + exploration culture.
Align your Innovation Ecosystem Stakeholders with Clear Explore Guidance
Letting the wrong projects into the Explore portfolio can be a very costly mistake for corporate innovation leaders.
In this article I show how leaders can align the various stakeholders of their innovation ecosystem and bring clarity on their priorities and the boundaries of their exploration with explicit Explore Guidance.
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.
My 2020 writing year in review
I tried to maintain good writing habits in 2020, despite my consulting workload and the impact of the pandemic.
In this post you can find the links to:
12 posts for the Strategyzer blog (that I update regularly on my personal blog),
A white paper: “Chasing European Unicorns” by AmCham, that I contributed to,
The Invincible Company webpage, the book I co-authored and that was released in April 2020.
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.