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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia

innovation

Steve Blank on Innovation

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Steve Blank talks about innovation at ESADE’s Business School Commencement Speech. Worth reading if you are interested in innovation and how to innovate inside companies.

An excerpt:

So how does a company act like a startup in search of new business models while still continuing to successfully execute.

First, management must understand that innovation happens not by exception but is integral to all parts of the firm. If they don’t, then the management team has simply become caretakers of the founders’ legacy. This never ends well.

Second and maybe the most difficult is the recognition that innovation is chaotic, messy and uncertain. Not everything will work out, but failure in innovation is not cause for firing but for learning. Managers need radically different tools to control and measure innovation. A company needs innovation policies, innovation processes and innovation incentives to match those it already has for execution. These will enable firms to embrace innovation by design not by exception.

Third, smart companies manage an innovation portfolio where they can pursue potential disruption in a variety of ways.

A video of the speech is also available.

Innovation and Super Normal Thinking

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Some quotes from an article by Dave Morin about innovation and Super Normal thinking in Startup Notes:

When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it Super Normal.

To apply Super Normal thinking we start by looking at what is normal and then ask the question: What are the key problems?

After mentioning some examples of innovations:

(…) In each of these cases, the innovator did not invent the category. They simply took what was “normal”, and added a twist. They added an innovation. The innovation solved a key problem of the “normal” use case that we all already understood.

(…) In each case, the innovator built on top of concepts which had already been iterated upon billions and billions of times in social systems. Too often we make the mistake of trying to use concepts in our products, and thus words in our interfaces, which have no current meaning to users. As an innovator with limited resources, building a new concept is not something you can usually afford to do.

Clayton Christensen on Disruption at Startup Grind 2013

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Mark Suster interviews Clayton Christensen at Startup Grind 2013. Christensen is author of the The Innovator’s Dilemma1,
and professor at Harvard Business School.

Helped by Suster’s excellent questions, Christensen talks about how disruption can affect different industries. He also explains the perils he forsees for now market leaders like Harvard University and Apple.

  1. From the voice Innovator’s Dilemma on Wikipedia: First published in 1997, Christensen suggests that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers’ current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business models that will meet customers’ unstated or future needs; he argues that such companies will eventually fall behind.
    Christensen calls this “disruptive innovation” and gives examples as diverse as the personal computer industry, milkshakes, and steel minimills. ↩

How Apple fosters open innovation

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Para los que tienen problemas para conciliar cómo abogan por software libre, pero están felices usando una Mac, les recomiendo este post de Wade Roush: The Apple Paradox: How a company that’s so closed can foster so much open innovation.

Algunos entrecomillados del post de Roush:

The paradox—and it may be one that goes to the heart of digital-age capitalism—is that Apple’s style of closed innovation results in technology that is so conducive to open innovation.

millions of designers, artists, musicians, writers, programmers, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, myself included. The Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity.

The reason I use Apple hardware all day long is not so that I can be like Steve, but because the company makes the best technology I’ve found for staying informed, synthesizing what I learn, and passing it along to others.

En la Mac disfrutas haciendo lo que sea. Produces. Es bella. En Linux, a veces te encuentras preguntándote por qué después del último upgrade ya no funciona el audio, o el micrófono en Skype… o para usar la tarjeta wifi de tu laptop tienes que abrir una terminal y usar ndiswrapper… Quizá Google cambie esto con el Android para netbook, pero por ahora, Mac.