Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem

This is the first part of a post co-written with Thierry De Baillon from Sonnez en cas d’absence. Read the second part here.   We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we […]

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The Future of Innovation is Open

Sustainable innovation requires evolution and revolution. Over the long term, organizations need to be capable of both moving along existing growth trajectories and creating new ones when the old business matures or stalls. This can be depicted as recurring movement along innovation s-curves. In the case of a new venture, acquiring lean start up skills […]

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Evolutionary and Revolutionary Innovation

Triggered by a couple of recent discussions, I’ve been pondering for a while now over the question how evolution relates to revolution when it comes to innovation. In the following, I’ll try to develop my view on this. Let’s define  evolution as continuous and incremental innovations of a firm’s existing business. Whereas revolution can be […]

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Innovators Hold Strong Visions Weakly

In one of my previous posts I discussed the crucial distinction between need and solution. Innovation is about matching these two components – i.e. solving a customer problem (desirability) through a viable business model, leveraging feasible products and services – in a novel way. It’s important to note that solutions are not represented by products […]

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Innovation and Diversity

Tomorrow’s management systems will need to value diversity, dissent and divergence as highly as conformance, consensus and cohesion. A while ago, I came across this tweet by Gary Hamel.  It reflects well the fact that businesses range in increasingly dynamic and complex environments, imposing accelerated and mostly unforeseeable change. The most promising way for organizations […]

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The Intersection of Human and Organizational Innovation Capabilities

One of my main interests is looking at the intersection of organizational and human capabilities. Business is accomplished through people, thus individual mindset, behavior and capabilities determine organizational performance. When it comes to innovation, a recently published research paper, titled ‘The Bias Against Creativity’ serves as a good example. The findings indicate a paradox that […]

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Innovation and Ambidexterity

Tim Kastelle wrote a post on “Staying Innovative While Growing”. I fully concur with his conclusion: “But it’s another innovation paradox – the small firms that might be most innovative often don’t have the market clout to get their ideas to diffuse. The firms that are big enough to get ideas to spread might not […]

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