Remove Business Model Remove Marketing Remove Operations Remove Ries
article thumbnail

How Big Companies Should Innovate

Harvard Business Review

They're bad at innovation by design: All the pressures and processes that drive them toward a profitable, efficient operation tend to get in the way of developing the innovations that can actually transform the business. We want our leaders to push their businesses toward profit generation. He was completely right.

article thumbnail

Looking to Join the Lean Start-up Movement?

Harvard Business Review

In my eyes, the work Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and others have done to provide a cogent, accessible frame around the academic concepts of emergent strategy is one of the most important contributions to the innovation movement over the past few years. Corporate leaders can take steps to encourage this kind of market-based learning.

Ries 8
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Scaling Is Hard. Here's How Akamai Did It.

Harvard Business Review

The Lean Start-Up movement, as exemplified in Eric Ries' book The Lean Start-Up , has appropriately focused a great deal of attention on the hard decisions and techniques required to create a company from nothing. And what lessons can be applied to the early decisions you make as a start-up? Scaling Akamai — Part 1: A Little Fat.

P&L 13
article thumbnail

How GE Stays Young

Harvard Business Review

Under CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s and 1990s, they adopted operational efficiency approaches (“ Workout ,” “Six Sigma,” and “Lean”) that reinforced their success and that many companies emulated. Chief Marketing Officer Beth Comstock told me they looked to see how they could take this battery technology to new markets.

article thumbnail

In Big Companies, Lean Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Harvard Business Review

In 2010, one of us was sitting in a room at the Harvard Business School with Eric Ries and a number of budding entrepreneurs. The language has been widely adopted, and that includes some folks who haven''t yet had the chance to read Ries'' work or digest the ideas behind it. Patient capital. or you might not.

article thumbnail

Don't Let the Minimum Win Over the Viable

Harvard Business Review

The widespread adoption of Eric Ries 's work beyond Silicon Valley has been a godsend for innovators. The Lean Startup has crystallized many of the ideas fundamental to successful innovation and provided companies with additional ways to understand and make room for rapid iteration, agile development, and in-market testing of new ideas.

Ries 16
article thumbnail

The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company

Harvard Business Review

Likewise, no matter how slick your company’s online idea market, it won’t yield many high-value ideas if your associates haven’t been taught to think like innovators. You have to be tracking trends your competitors haven’t yet noticed, then figuring out ways of using them to upend traditional business models.