Archive for: November, 2011

How to manage through disruption

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe, interviews Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia.

Mr. Elop has some great thoughts about innovation and about managing through disruption. It’s interesting because both of them worked at Macromedia before it was bought by Adobe. If you remember well, Macromedia used to make authoring tools for CD-Rom’s back in the day before the internet existed.

They saw that the internet was a potentially disruptive force that would undermine their business and so they had to make decisions on where to focus and place their bets. Their bet was Flash and they put all of the resources behind it. Flash went on to become the leading platform for creating dynamic content on the web.

Reward insight or reward ideas? Both and…

This is a tricky question.

First of all, insights are different from ideas. Insights are more important than ideas. Breakthrough businesses are build on insights, not ideas. Ideas come after the insight. Yet in innovation circles we constantly hear that we should reward people for coming up with ideas. What about rewarding people for insights?

An insights is an undeniable truth. A pain that a large number of people have and agree on. A brainstorm to come up with potential solutions to that pain would then be called upon.

But let’s also consider that sometimes good ideas originate out of no insight whatsoever.