Fast Company If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

"With such examples as Apple in mind, a number of skeptics are beginning to ask whether our heedless reverence for innovation is blinding us to its limits, misuse, and risks. It's possible, they say, to innovate pointlessly, to choose the wrong model for innovation, and to pursue innovation at the expense of other virtues that are at least as important to lasting business success, such as consistency and follow-through. When it comes to economic value, Schumpeter's creative destruction may have an evil twin: destructive creation.

James Andrews, of the Boston Consulting Group, for example, argues that too many companies presume that they can boost profits merely by fostering creativity. "To be a truly innovative company is not just coming up with great new ideas, or products and services," he says. "It is coming up with ones than generate enough cash to cover your costs and reward your shareholders.""

redux [09.30.03]
HBS Working Knowledge Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater

"Forging ahead without detailed specifications to guide you obviously requires innovation, new actions. We take this observation one step further by suggesting that knowledge work, which adds value in large part because of its capacity for innovation, can and often should be structured as artists structure their work. Managers should look to collaborative artists rather than to more traditional management models if they want to create economic value in this new century.

We call this approach artful making ."

Wired News IBM Examines How Inventors Invent

""Is it innovation if everyone can see that it is?" he asked, drawing a few murmurs of agreement. "Innovation is not obvious at the time."

Such scientific soul-searching pervaded IBM's inaugural Innovation Days, a weeklong stretch in September when the technology giant asked 3,000 researchers at eight labs around the world to take off their goggles and re-examine their jobs."

redux [09.06.02]
Inc The Innovation Factor: Inside Innovative Minds

"The inferiority complex is one of the more devilish aspects of the human condition. For the business owner, it often rears its head with respect to innovation. You know you have what it takes to start and grow a company. But are you conforming to industry norms or transforming them? Do you dare claim the title of innovator?

In the spring 2001 edition of the Drucker Foundation journal, Leader to Leader, Margaret J. Wheatley published an essay bearing the feel-good title "We Are All Innovators." In it, she asserts that innovation is not an extraterrestrial phenomenon; it's what we mortals do best. She writes: "Scientists keep discovering more species; there may be more than 50 million of them on earth, each the embodiment of an innovation that worked. Yet when we look at our own species, we frequently say we're 'resistant to change.' Could this possibly be true? Are we the only species -- out of 50 million -- that digs in its heels and resists? Or perhaps all those other creatures simply went to better training programs on 'Innovation for Competitive Advantage'?""

redux [05.16.02]
MIT Technology Review The Rules of Innovation

"The management of innovation today is where the Quality Movement was 20 years ago, in that many believe the outcomes of innovation efforts are unpredictable. The raison d'etre of the venture capital industry is belief in the unpredictability of new businesses. A few ventures will succeed; most won't, the VCs say. They therefore place a portfolio of bets, extracting premium prices for their capital in order to earn the high return required to compensate for the risk that unpredictability imposes. I believe, however, that innovation isn't random. Every undesired outcome has a cause. Those outcomes appear to be random when we don't understand all the factors that affect successful innovation. If we could understand and manage these variables, innovation wouldn't be nearly as risky as it appears.

The good news is that recent years have seen considerable progress in identifying important variables that affect the probability of success in innovation."

redux [02.07.02]
Inc.Com The Disruptive Start-Up: Clayton Christensen On How To Compete With The Best

"The whole story is about motivation. The leaders in every industry have vast resources at their disposal. If I try to grab a piece of real estate that the established leaders want, where the customers are attractive and the business is attractive, the evidence is overwhelming that the leaders will win. So what I want to do is to craft a strategy that takes advantage of what I would call asymmetry of motivation. That is, a situation where I'm motivated to go after the business of the market leaders, but the piece of their business that I can most naturally go after is the one that they're the least motivated to defend.

Remember that when a new idea emerges in an established company, it needs to get funded. And the only ideas that get funded are those that help the established company make more money. That process favors the ideas that create improved products for existing customers, and tends to reject more innovative, or disruptive, ideas. That is what creates disruptive entrepreneurial opportunities."

redux [01.21.02]
Business 2.0 The 15-Minute Competitive Advantage

"The path to success involves staying a little ahead of the competition but close enough that customers can still understand your product and incorporate it into their lives and businesses. I recently conducted a survey of 785 tech company executives to find out why some succeeded and others did not. I found that newer companies (started after 1980) were much more likely than larger, established companies to cite marketplace barriers -- with customers that were not receptive or ready -- as a primary obstacle. Human behavior is much slower to change than technology.

Years of research shows that the innovations most likely to take hold are those that don't demand excessive change from the customer. Incrementalism -- represented by the following eight characteristics -- is key."

redux [01.08.01]
MIT Technology Review In the Weeds

"The problem isn't figuring out how to get people to become more "innovative"; it's figuring out how to get people to accept and apply innovations more productively. The glut of new ideas has paradoxically created a critical shortage of the human ingredients that determine just how quickly and cost effectively they get used.

So instead of celebrating the "heroic brilliance" of innovators, this column will explore innovation from a different and more important perspective. After all, it is customers and clients--not innovators--who determine how great ideas become successful innovations."

redux [05.03.01]
Fast Company Hard Cell

"In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport."

strategy+business Top 10 Innovation Themes

"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?

To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential "innovation themes," which are repeated and proven over time."

redux [03.06.01]
First Monday Intermittent Aberrations: Can Mature Companies Innovate?

"A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration."

redux [11.07.00]
BusinessWeek The Innovator's Dilemma

"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."