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Two Questions to Ask Before You Set Up an Innovation Unit

Harvard Business Review

The seven roles for CIUs are: designing shelter for innovation; supporting best practices and methods; developing skills; supporting business unit initiatives; identifying new market spaces; facilitating ideas generation; and directing seed funding. following a traditional stage-gate process).

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A Disciplined Approach to Evaluating Ideas

Harvard Business Review

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."). This kind of process can help successfully move an idea from a Post-It note to the market.

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

Harvard Business Review

Truth is, you can have the right portfolio of investments, the right metrics and governance, the right stage-gate development process, and the right talent on the right teams — but if you don’t design the right handoffs between your teams, all of that planning falls apart. But a sickening number of those investments fail.

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What Big Companies Get Wrong About Innovation Metrics

Harvard Business Review

Market share, cost reductions, and profit margins of new businesses are examples of impact metrics. The most widely used metric among our respondents, for instance, was revenue being generated by new products or services over the course of their first few years in the market. Stage-gate specific metrics, i.e. projects moving from one.

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How to Fund Indian Start-Ups

Harvard Business Review

Even more difficult is to build a business that requires capital out of the gate. But if you need funding in the seed stages, before validation, there is very little capital in the system. So the Indian seed stage ecosystem is really small. More recently, there is an over active incubator network that has taken hold.

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The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company

Harvard Business Review

By now, your company probably has a new busi­ness incubator, an idea wiki, a disciplined process for mining customer insights, an awards program for successful innovators, and maybe even an outpost in Silicon Valley—all fine ideas—and yet, most likely, it still struggles to meet its growth goals and seldom thrills its customers.

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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.