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Two Questions to Ask Before You Set Up an Innovation Unit

Harvard Business Review

Despite good intentions—and widespread acceptance of the importance of innovation—efforts to innovate at large companies often lack a clear mission and framework, and as a result, they go off the rails. At Samsung, the other aspects of the innovation process are relatively well managed at the operating level.

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How to Hand Off an Innovation Project from One Team to Another

Harvard Business Review

That fear drives their companies to invest millions into coming up with breakthrough innovations. If innovation projects are going to succeed, they’ll need to survive a handoff from an innovation team to an execution team. These labels also nicely describe the phases of innovation: Explore, Scale, and Optimize.

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What Big Companies Get Wrong About Innovation Metrics

Harvard Business Review

The fear of getting Netflix-ed or Uber-ized is spurring big companies to dial up their investment in innovation. But as investment increases, many companies are struggling with a challenging question: how do you know whether your chosen innovation strategy is actually bearing fruit? Number of projects in the innovation pipeline.

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A Disciplined Approach to Evaluating Ideas

Harvard Business Review

That's one memorable piece of advice from a leader at a global innovation powerhouse. The general way around this problem seems simple enough — have a process by which you evaluate ideas in different ways at different stages of development (most call this a "stage-gate process.").

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The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company

Harvard Business Review

Can you think of any business topic that’s been hotter for longer than innovation? In a McKinsey poll , 94% of the managers surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their company’s innovation performance. And yet when it comes to innovation, the gap between aspiration and accomplishment seems as big as ever.

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Interview with Sramana Mitra on 1M/1M Program

Rajesh Setty

Through the Entrepreneur Journeys project, I have come to conclude that the most vulnerable phase in an entrepreneur’s life is the pre-$1 million revenue stage. In my roundtables, the vast majority of entrepreneurs I work with are in this rather vulnerable pre $1 million revenue stage. This is where numerous ventures fail.

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Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo

Harvard Business Review

Billed as a set of tools for innovation, design thinking has been enthusiastically and, to some extent, uncritically adopted by firms and universities alike as an approach for the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. When it comes to design thinking, the bloom is off the rose. A New Name for an Old Method.