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How Merck Is Trying to Keep Disrupters at Bay

Harvard Business Review

With its Emerging Businesses (EB) group (where one of us serves as President), Merck started a journey about three years ago with a core investment thesis: there are areas of growing unmet need in health care that intersect with its established competencies.

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The 5 Things IBM Needs to Do to Win at AI

Harvard Business Review

The kinds of shifts we’re talking about have come more naturally to greatly successful startups of the last two decades — Google, Amazon, Uber, and Facebook among them — and their venture capital investors. Smart venture capitalists invest in a portfolio of startups with different risk profiles and timeframes for returns.

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Big Companies Can Unleash Innovation, Rather than Shackle It

Harvard Business Review

Here's why: the innovation revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale allows big companies to shift from shackling innovation to unleashing it. As I discussed in my post How Big Companies Can Save Innovation , large companies are now better positioned to innovate than ever before.

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The $300 House: The Marketing Challenge

Harvard Business Review

That's enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. That's a surplus of $700 a year. How do we do that?