Remove Innovation Remove Operations Remove Productivity Remove Ries
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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. But giving up the pursuit of innovation seems less than satisfying, if not unrealistic.

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The Most Innovative Companies Don’t Worry About Consensus

Harvard Business Review

Nick readily grasps the value in testing his ideas before asking for any full-scale operation. In so doing, you increase the speed of innovation and decrease the cost of failure. If I can spend $10,000 for a one-day experiment that will tell me if a product won’t work in the future — that’s cheap. In the case of Widget 2.0,

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How to Innovate with an Executive Sponsor

Harvard Business Review

Meaningful innovation requires sponsorship. We seed our organizations with resources — people, capital, and equipment — and those resources have productive value in certain areas. At its core, Penrose's idea is the reason innovation requires sponsorship. It always has.

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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. You need to think like a portfolio manager, allocating resources both to innovate in your core and for the future.

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Why GE’s Jeff Immelt Lost His Job: Disruption and Activist Investors

Harvard Business Review

In his Harvard Business Review article summing up his tenure, Immelt recalls that the two things that influenced him most were Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal article “ Why Software Is Eating the World ” and Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup. Innovation at GE was on a roll. Then it wasn’t.

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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. For that reason, the "Lean" mentality is one of the most powerful tools in the innovator''s arsenal — in startups and mature corporations alike. One of these young entrepreneurs in particular stood out.

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Build Your Brand as a Relationship

Harvard Business Review

Al Ries and Jack Trout capture the essence of this model in their classic book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Sergio Zyman, in The End of Marketing as We Know It , says: “A brand is essentially a container for a customer’s complete experience with the product or company.”

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