Tag Archives | Leadership

Innovation is About Getting Beyond the Idea

By on September 2, 2018

Thomas Edison said it over a century ago: Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Unfortunately, no one listened. When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically allot almost all of their time and energy to that initial 1 percent – the thrilling hunt for the breakthrough idea. The real innovation challenge, however, lies beyond […]

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Digital Transformation Combines Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency

By on December 13, 2017

In 2015 and 2017, research by Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner surveyed several hundred enterprises, examining both the capabilities needed for digital business transformation and the impacts on performance. Becoming ‘future-ready’ requires changing the enterprise on two dimensions: Customer experience and operational efficiency. [Update 09.08.18] Indeed, this chosen pair of dimensions turns out to be highly […]

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Scaling Up Startups in Corporate Settings

By on November 17, 2017

This ‘opinion’ on the question “What can startups and incumbents learn from each other and what are the biggest threats?” was originally published at innoboard.de.   In recent years, an increasing intensity in collaboration between incumbent companies and startups has been observed. Meanwhile, close to 80% of corporations and startups have already been or are […]

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Peer Group “Scaling-Up”: Initial Survey Results

By on October 1, 2017

This article was co-written with Frank Mattes.   As published in a recent post, we have initiated a Peer Group of leading European companies which share our view that Best Practices with respect to scaling up validated concepts (successfully emerging from the “Fuzzy Front End”) to business impact need to be in place to sustainably […]

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Hallmarks of Organizational Ambidexterity

By on August 27, 2017

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you may know we’ve been relentlessly highlighting the importance of organizational ambidexterity as vital requirement for modern dual corporate innovation approaches. Managing today’s business and creating future’s business successfully at the same time is probably the most demanding, yet indispensable challenge for future-proof organizations and their leaders. But what are hallmarks of successful organizational ambidexterity? What do […]

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Bad Innovation Systems Beat Good Innovators (Almost) Every Time

By on March 26, 2017

W. Edwards Deming once famously stated: A bad system will beat a good person every time.  What was Deming trying to convey with this quote? It wasn’t an attempt to get people to give up trying because failure was certain. It was an attempt to get people to understand the importance of the system and […]

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The Case for Dual Innovation

By on April 7, 2016

The first time I was advocating the idea of a dual innovation approach, here also referred to as organizational ambidexterity, is now more than 5 years ago. At this time it became pretty obvious to me that this concept – academically worn-out but deficiently or not at all put into practice in most organizations – would be of increasing importance […]

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A Model for Integrative Innovation Management

By on March 21, 2016

In previous posts, I have shared my view on important cornerstones for successful innovation management systems. As pointed out several times, balanced and up-to-date innovation management requires organizational ambidexterity, i.e. the capability to explore novel offerings and capabilities while simultaneously exploiting existing ones. In the following, I would like to summarize and complement these thoughts by suggesting an innovation management model that may help organizations to innovate more […]

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Innovation Requires Dedicated Management

By on July 19, 2015

For quite some time, I’ve been advocating the idea that successful and sustainable corporate innovation management systems should be based on the following cornerstones: Organizational ambidexterity: Sustainable innovation management is required to account for organizational ambidexterity, i.e. optimizing existing businesses and developing new businesses have to be driven in parallel. Failing to achieve an individually optimal balance will not lead to company success in the short and long […]

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Innovation and Organizational Culture

By on February 14, 2015

Recently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has published key findings of their latest “Most Innovative Companies 2014” survey. Beside the annual ranking, headed by the top three companies Apple, Google and Samsung, some insightful outcomes with regard to organizational and cultural requirements have striked my eye. According to BCG’s research, successfully innovating companies approach innovation as a system. The system is rooted in experimentation, […]

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