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Match Your Innovation Process to the Results You Want

Harvard Business Review

We are often asked whether the best way to structure for innovation is top-down or bottom-up. Bottom-up approaches work well for incremental (keeps you in the game) innovations. Breakthrough (changes the game) innovations, contrary to popular belief, need a top-down approach. They must also be willing to see value in absurdity.

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Why Some Digital Companies Should Delay Profitability for as Long as They Can

Harvard Business Review

This has led to high levels of AWS specific investment from innovators like CloudHealth Technologies, Qubole, Mapbox, and the like. That ecosystem investment reinforces the value proposition and drives more developer adoption. How can you continuously defer short term profitability to grow your network effect?

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What Xerox PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

Harvard Business Review

The concept of open innovation has moved from business phrase to business reality over the last ten years. When PARC became a for-profit subsidiary of Xerox to practice open innovation in 2002, Henry Chesbrough had not yet published his book Open Innovation and the concept was not well understood.

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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

But we recognize that, in many businesses, resources are often allocated according to short-term, bottom-line pressures. We found that sustainable and deforestation-free practices created significant financial benefits for all players in the industry’s value chain. of revenues).

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Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth

Harvard Business Review

Today, the average cost of equity capital sits at close to half that: just 8% for the roughly 1600 companies comprising the Value Line Index. So, in real terms, debt financing is essentially free. In these circumstances, strategies that generate faster growth create more value for most companies than those that improve profit margins.

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How to Choose the Ideas Your Company Should Invest In

Harvard Business Review

In The Innovator's Guide to Growth we suggested that companies should create one-page "Idea Resumes" that capture the essence of an idea on a single PowerPoint slide. If you don't have an innovation strategy , go and create one.). Note what isn't part of the decision: an idea's net present value or return on investment.

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