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What SpaceX Can Teach Us About Cost Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Earlier this week, the space-transport start-up SpaceX had its most successful launch test yet with Grasshopper, the first fully and rapidly reusable rocket. Musk quickly zeroed in on the one area ripe for innovation: cost reduction. SpaceX developed a plan for sustaining the lower-cost business model over many years.

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For Some Platforms, Network Effects Are No Match for Local Know-How

Harvard Business Review

And what can Grab teach us about the future of platform businesses? To venture capitalists and the financial market, no business model is more attractive than a platform. Transportation, aviation, health care, and energy all require physical delivery, whereas media, music, and advertisement do not.

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Many CEOs Aren’t Breakthrough Innovators (and That’s OK)

Harvard Business Review

Innovation is widely regarded as important to long-term business performance. So, to achieve higher performance, should company boards and investors choose CEOs with the expertise that would better qualify them to lead innovation? For the rest, we found that other factors besides innovation drove strong shareholder returns.

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How Ford Is Thinking About the Future

Harvard Business Review

” But if you are the Ford Motor Company and face the prospect of investing billions in new technology while your century-old business model is overturned, you might first have a few questions. Develop a portfolio of new business models. Any new venture or business model is risky.

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Alphabet Isn’t a Typical Conglomerate

Harvard Business Review

In the years ahead, Alphabet could dramatically influence business models in many industries. This new entity could bring together human talent, technology scale, and long-horizon venture and investment approaches to construct business models that could pose a formidable challenge to those designed and perfected in the industrial age.

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How Likely Is Your Industry to Be Disrupted? This 2×2 Matrix Will Tell You

Harvard Business Review

For the latter, we measured incumbents’ operational efficiency, commitment to innovation, and defenses against attack. In transportation, for example, on-demand options have roiled the market, and traditional taxis are fighting back, belatedly, with apps such as Arro and Way2Ride. Consider the newspaper-publishing industry.

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Great Brands Never Have to “Give Back”

Harvard Business Review

What sounded on the surface like a noble effort to show the company’s concern for women, however, failed to square with the chain’s long-standing advertising strategy of appealing to young men by portraying scantily-clad females suggestively eating its products. A few years ago the West Coast hamburger chain Carl’s Jr.

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