The Need for Speed: The Most Effective Way to Move Quickly is to Make the Right Decisions the First Time
Speed is often touted as a critical factor for success, with businesses of all sizes striving to move swiftly to capitalize on opportunities, stay ahead of the competition and save money. However, there’s a crucial nuance to this need for speed: it’s not just about moving fast; it’s about moving fast in the right direction. Here lies the distinction between mere haste and effective leadership.
How to Fail at Innovation #8: Believing Users Can Tell You What They Will Buy
Advising against relying solely on consumer focus group feedback in the innovation process can seem counterintuitive at first glance. After all, customer insights are crucial for designing products or services that meet market and user needs. However, there are compelling reasons why researchers and innovators might need to exercise caution with focus group feedback.
How To F-Up Innovation #16: Poor Project Portfolio Management
Innovations have no value until they are launched. The most effective way to launch more, and better, innovations is to practice innovation portfolio optimization. The issue isn’t ”if” your company is practicing innovation portfolio management, it’s “how”.
How CEOs F-Up Innovation #14: the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome
CEO’s can F-up innovation both by denying NIH is an issue in their company, and by failing to embrace outside innovations in the innovation portfolio.
Stop Wasting Time On Ineffective Innovation Management Practices
R&D and innovation management executives are always looking to implement best practices that improve their opportunity for success. However, many practices and ‘common-sense’ innovation management decisions don’t have any correlation with innovation success or failure.
Inflection Points: when current strategies no longer work
Inflection points manifest in two primary forms: expansion or contraction. However, both signify the same reality; strategies that worked in the past may no longer suffice in the future. Successfully navigating through either type of inflection point is crucial for a business’s survival.
While many executives rely on financial metrics to detect inflection point shifts, these metrics often lag behind the actual changes.
Are innovation failures always as obvious in the moment as they are post-facto?
Are innovation failures always as obvious in the moment as they are post-facto? Here’s a short list of some product launches that, on paper, had all the elements needed for success, but were total failures none the less. I’m not listing head-scratching new products like Juicero, but thoughtful, strategic innovations that could have been successful. […]
The Primary Reason I See Innovators Fail
A primary reason I see many small businesses fail to grow, or even fail completely, is the reluctance of their founders to embrace sales as the most critical function for their success.
Four Reasons Executives Should Stop Innovating
The first step in launching a successful new product is to avoid the common traps that nearly guarantee failure.
Leaders need to ask themselves why failed products were launched in the first place. How did leaders NOT see that some products were certain to fail.
Three Rules to Follow When Making Innovation Decisions
Making any decision about innovation is extremely challenging. Leaders are frequently confronted with the need to make definitive choices in situations where the potential outcomes are, at best, unclear.
To achieve success in innovation, leaders must adhere to these three fundamental rules when making decisions.