Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 27, 2010

I thought it would be helpful to provide the list of 31 questions, and my one sentence perspective on each question, as it dovetails with my current book project (tentatively titled, The Little Black Book of Innovation.) Consider it a summary of what's on my mind as 2010 comes to a close. How do you define innovation?

Innovation 16

Innovation Govindarajan Disruptive Innovation Business Model 16

Roundtable Talk

JUNE 22, 2010

If you want accountability, then people have to have a say in how things are going to roll out. And, be sure to plan for enough time for the discussion.

Tips 34

Tips Team Bottom-up Teamwork 34

Harvard Business Review

JULY 4, 2014

Today, almost every industry is vulnerable to the effects of digitization and to what Accenture calls “Big Bang Disruption.” New services can quickly go from trial to large-scale rollout and massive adoption, and established players can fall quickly by the wayside; think of how mobile GPS applications have taken the market by storm.

Insurance 15

Insurance Disruptive Innovation Industry Innovation 15

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 29, 2010

Our soon ending year, 2010, has been fascinating. I argued a few months ago that the innovation axis was shifting from the West to the East. Silicon Valley remains the global hot spot of innovation, and America continues to churn out innovative companies like Groupon and Bloom Energy.

Innovation 15

Innovation Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur Gilbert 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Think of Charles Darwin, the ultimate disruptive innovator. In The Innovator's Dilemma , he looked at why companies struggle to deal with radical innovation in their markets. The book introduced the idea of disruptive innovation to a generation of managers. First, ideas are important.

Blue Ocean Strategy 15

Blue Ocean Strategy Management Christensen Balanced Scorecard 15

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 20, 2013

Keeping it productively innovative and innovatively productive is another. What happens to self-image and individual expectations as enterprise definitions of "productively innovative" and "innovatively productive" change? At a certain point, innovation cultures are as much about "credibility" as creativity and ingenuity.

Innovation 14

Innovation Disruptive Innovation Bottom-up Metrics 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 4, 2014

Today, almost every industry is vulnerable to the effects of digitization and to what Accenture calls “Big Bang Disruption.” New services can quickly go from trial to large-scale rollout and massive adoption, and established players can fall quickly by the wayside; think of how mobile GPS applications have taken the market by storm.

Insurance 8

Insurance Disruptive Innovation Industry Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 1, 2014

By contrast, disruptors like Tesla (or, for that matter, Google ) gain a new advantage by understanding, leveraging, and ultimately staking a claim in the broader ecosystem, drawing heavily on innovation from outside traditional industry boundaries. Not exactly – despite the product it markets and sells to consumers.

Automotive 9

Automotive Industry Disruptive Innovation Open-book 9

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 16, 2013

No advertising innovation: The "I'm a Mac/"I'm a PC" campaign ran for three and a half years without a refresh. Also, Consumer Reports issued a "does not recommend" on the iPhone 4 (in 2010). There are other markets waiting to be disrupted, for sure. Bad quality control: MobileMe, antenna-gate. No iPad mini at all.

Marketing 11

Marketing Stage-Gate Advertising Price 11

Harvard Business Review

JULY 15, 2013

The fastest-growing segments of America''s job market — by far — are temporary and part-time employment. Workflows and innovation initiatives have been artfully reorganized around "projects" to facilitate faster, cheaper and easier contingent participation. They''re rethinking their economic relationships with the rest.

Human Capital 9

Human Capital Real Estate Human Resources Disruptive Innovation 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 23, 2011

pace in the first quarter of 2010. Clayton Christensen's theories of innovation provide us a great lens through which we can understand this seeming paradox. This is because firms operating in free markets are much more capable of employing emergent strategies than are governments. That was down from 9.7%

GDP 13

GDP Christensen Disruptive Innovation Business Model 13

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

But there are further reasons for optimism, and lessons for companies looking to understand the power of indigenous entrepreneurs in emerging markets. The latest set of contracts, penned in 2010 , have run aground due to haggling over Chinese access to oil blocks and the threat of unfavorable regulation.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Disruptive Innovation Politics Christensen 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

But there are further reasons for optimism, and lessons for companies looking to understand the power of indigenous entrepreneurs in emerging markets. The latest set of contracts, penned in 2010 , have run aground due to haggling over Chinese access to oil blocks and the threat of unfavorable regulation.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Disruptive Innovation Politics Christensen 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

According to Méndez-García, one of the best models for making sense of a non-linear world is the S-curve , the model we have used to understand the diffusion of disruptive innovations, and which he and I speculate can be used to understand personal disruption — the necessary pivots in our own career paths.

Learning Curve 10

Learning Curve Market Penetration Disruptive Innovation Kaplan 10

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 10, 2014

The Boston Innovation District’s meteoric real estate prices are pushing the very entrepreneurs who made the district sexy towards neighboring districts where rents have not tripled since 2010. The $19 billion sale of WhatsApp’s to Facebook made Koum and Acton, overnight, vastly wealthier than their next door neighbors.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Supply Chain Real Estate Entrepreneur 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 4, 2014

Most pundits agreed on what was wrong — a lack of breakthrough innovation since the passing of founder Steve Jobs. But in our view, Apple faces a deeper problem: the industries most susceptible to its unique disruptive formula are just too small to meet its growth needs. When Innovation Is Strategy. in Innovation.

Industry 8

Industry Wireless Advertising Content 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2013

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.

Company 9

Company Ries Maturity Innovation 9

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 31, 2011

This experience came back to me in late 2010, listening to Steve Kaufman , a senior lecturer at HBS and the former CEO of Arrow Electronics, presenting at the Forum for Growth and Innovation. On the topic of acquisitions, Kaufman recounted the standing advice of the former head of Arrow's acquisition integration team.

Uncertainty 15

Uncertainty Maslow Disruptive Innovation Report 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 24, 2013

I recently wrote a blog post about the forces of competition and market change that are affecting the legal profession, causing many firms to now take the once unthinkable step of letting even senior partners go if they can't produce sufficient revenues to contribute to the firm's bottom lines (as reported in the Wall Street Journal ).

Creativity 8

Creativity Short-term Trends Education 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 19, 2011

Yesterday HP announced that it would exit the PC and tablet computer business , focusing on higher-margin "strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government markets." Consider how HP and Apple faced the changes in the PC market almost exactly a decade ago. •On Why is that?

Software 9

Software Maturity Resistance Business Model 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 15, 2016

Today, the term increasingly serves as a corporate bogeyman that warns executives of the need to stand up and respond when disruptive developments encroach on their market. Once one of the most powerful companies in the world, today the company has a market capitalization of less than $1 billion. Why did this happen?

Technology 8

Technology Film Gilbert Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 20, 2010

Its appearance marks a markets' phase transition from early adopters to mega-profits. Undo matters, in other words, because its appearance almost always signals that a market has gone from fringe to mainstream, with profits set to follow. It's telling us that software as a service just blinked into being mainstream in 2010.

Early Adopters 14

Early Adopters Norton Wilde Software 14

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 6, 2011

My return flight from Newark to Singapore on last week pushed me over 300,000 miles in the air in 2010. Anyway, during my travels, I've kept a running list of observations, travel tips for those of you coming to Asia for either a short trip or an extended stay, and thoughts on innovation, all gleaned from my first year based here.

Airlines 15

Airlines Hotels Travel Chemicals 15

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

Smartphone sales in 2011 are estimated to reach 468 million units, a 57% increase over 2010. A brand also has to be aligned with the market profile of the consumer segment. Many companies forget to align customer service with the brand proposition for the targeted market segment.

Brand 11

Brand B2C Market Segmentation Travel 11

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Four years ago, Craig Hatkoff, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, approached me about a brainstorm: an event recognizing and celebrating breakthrough innovators. When I suggested to Clayton Christensen that we partner with Hatkoff to create the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards , Clay’s response was : I trust you Whitney.

Innovation 11

Innovation Christensen Decisionmaking CTO 11

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 1, 2013

In April 2010, V.R. This belief led Ferose to overhaul SAP Labs India's hierarchical, 'top-heavy' corporate culture, allowing bottom-up creativity and innovation to blossom. Ferose became the managing director of SAP Labs India, one of fifteen global R&D centers of the German software giant SAP.

Innovation 9

Innovation Attrition Software Globalization 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

When the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee wraps up the Third Plenum on November 12, 2014, a shift from efficiency to innovation will likely be one of the major planks in its vision for China. Some argue that China is already well on its way to becoming a global innovation power that will rival the US and Europe.

Innovation 8

Innovation Globalization Venture Capitalist GDP 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

The shutdown will be completed by early 2014, bringing to a close a dramatic story of rise and fall at the hands of disruptive technological innovation, or what we have called “ big bang disruption.” As recently as 2002, the company had a market value of $5 billion. For years, Blockbuster seemed unbeatable.

Disruptive Innovation 8

Disruptive Innovation Intangible Assets Retail Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 4, 2016

Twitter’s market cap just plummeted after a bad earnings report. Given that news, it seems that businesses that have dominated their markets are learning that the magic elixir of network effects and winner-takes-all advantages are about as reliable as cures for baldness. What markets have these companies actually won?

First-mover Advantage 8

First-mover Advantage Advertising Marketing Disruptive Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

The innovation came about because Laird aspired to surf a deepwater reef break on the north shore of Maui called Peahi, or Jaws, where waves can reach 120 feet high. Our analysis showed the top 20 firms in Fortune 's 2010 list of fastest-growing companies received $3.40 in incremental market capitalization for every $1.00

B2C 12

B2C Strategy B2B Waterman 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 20, 2013

As a result, in recent years, innovative ideas have been stifled and entire industries have fallen into the death spiral of cost/price cutting commoditization. Instead of risk = bad, leaders need to understand that today, calculated risk = innovation, meeting marketplace demands, leapfrogging competition and creating true profit.

Dunning 8

Dunning Project CTO Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

Like Silicon Valley, Singapore has strong research institutions and limited enforcement of noncompete clauses, a condition that academics now suggest can be a major driver of innovation. Like Israel, Singapore is small, with limited natural resources, which means economic growth requires innovative macroeconomic approaches.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Incubator Venture Capitalist Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning , approximately 5.6 Many school districts in small, rural, and urban markets that do not have access to the breath of education available in more resource plenty areas will pull humanities, arts, economics, Chinese, and quality A.P.

Education 15

Education Innovation Christensen Disruptive Innovation 15