Tag Archives: google

For innovation: More prototypes, less powerpoints

in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership

rapid prototyping innovationRadically better products don’t stand on the shoulder of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed. – Eric Schmidt

Indeed. Scrappy startups are known for acting with speed and conviction, while established organizations are slow and risk averse. When implemented well, speed and surprise are the ultimate equalizers. To achieve surprise, you need an unexpected idea first. Second, you need to have the ability to execute that idea. Third, you need to decide when and how to execute the idea.

It is at the moment of making the decision where most established organizations fail. Why? Because most large organizations don’t empower their employees to make decisions.…

Innovators widen their view of competition

in competition, entrepreneurship, Greatness, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy

I’m sure you’ve been in meetings where everyone worries about competition more than they worry about customers. It is a fact that for traditionally run businesses, any talk about strategy quickly shifts to competition. It’s unavoidable and it pisses me off.  Traditional business practice is based on beating the competition, which assumes that there is competition that looks and plays just like you if you are starting a business. …

Innovators are the early adapters

in entrepreneurship, Innovation

robert scoble google glassFor as long as I can remember, I’ve adopted new products and services when they are just starting out. It’s very common that I get requests to “try this and that” for startups looking for early adopters and beta testers. As such, my main objective in adopting products and services that are in beta is the following:

  • Staying updated on the latest stuff that doesn’t fit with the current reality;
  • I get a feel for what could be next on the horizon from another perspective;
  • How can begin to adapt it to the real world and what would I learn.

It’s rare that I come across other people who do the same, most adopt a new product or service only once it’s become part of the daily conversation. Unfortunately, the same applies to wannabe innovators…

This is the classic case of being an early adopter. But there is a distinction between adopter and adapter: innovator’s aren’t the early adopters, they are the early adapters.

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The benefits of thinking and doing BIG

in Creativity, entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership

do epic shitBIG ideas get all the attention by the media, bloggers, journalists and the like because Big ideas, like anything that is coming out of Google X, have the possibility to create waves of change for society.

Businesses that want to call their latest and greatest invention the next best thing should be thoughtful about what it is they are promoting. Though we can all tell BIG from SAME, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs calling their latest venture The New Thing; frankly most of the time it isn’t.

So, to determine whether or not something is really The New Thing we can use the following criteria: it’s new, surprising and radically useful.

The more precise one is about what “innovation means and looks to us”, the more focused the efforts will be and thus the more interesting one becomes. From a business relevance standpoint, beyond the media coverage one gets, thinking and doing big has other benefits as well:…

Stagnating? Innovate how you innovate with these 5 ideas

in Innovation, Leadership

If a project has disruptive potential, it should make you uncomfortable.Throughout this past year, I’ve been having conversations with innovation leaders from a couple of BIG companies about re-inventing their innovation capability. The pattern of conversation: we’ve had a good run, but feel that our process for making innovation happen is delivering incremental results. Bureaucracy has developed, and so we aren’t taking a lot of risks anymore. How do we shake ourselves out of it?

This is a classic situation of the initial innovation enthusiasm becoming stagnant because innovation’s main killers are not kept at bay: GroupThink and ExpertThink.

One leads to consensus, and the other to unchallenged best practices. In combination both lead to stagnation. Later on, it will become more difficult to innovate because silence and fear will become the norm. Then you will really have a challenge in your hands!…

The litmus test for innovation leadership

in Innovation, Leadership

People are the biggest barrier to innovation. Be it the executive who dominates every conversation, the one that talks but doesn’t walk the talk or the one that kills all ideas just because it’s not in his/her best interest. Unfortunately that’s the sad truth about how innovation dies in large organizations; there are people who kill innovation.…