Posts by Jeffrey Phillips
What Dubai Gets Right About Innovation
You may think of Dubai as a place for tourism, or to see the tallest building, or to ski indoors on a 100 degree day, and you’d be right. But don’t miss what they are doing to build an experimental platform for innovation as a city-state. The whole city and government are moving quickly and it will bear watching to see what’s next.
Read MoreEliminating Walls in B2B Platforms (keep an eye on Amazon)
The stark truth of platforms and ecosystems for B2B companies is that there will never be one dominant platform that everyone accepts and leverages. In fact there will almost always be several segmented platforms in any company or industry. This means there is real value in being a platform bridge or connector.
Read MoreTwo Diverse Authors: Recapping our Thoughts on Platform and Ecosystem
For those of you following our posts about ecosystems and platforms and their importance to innovation, this is the 30th post. We thought it made sense to take a breather before pushing on to other ideas, to stop and recap what we’ve been writing about, and to place some of these ideas in context.
Read MoreTurning the Innovation Tables
Recently, I attended an interesting program co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina’s health care innovation program and AARP. This got me thinking. We’re doing corporate innovation all wrong, and the innovation sprint that UNC and AARP were conducting have got it right. Let’s imagine for a second what this would look like in a corporate setting.
Read MoreHow to Tell If Innovation Matters to Your CEO
Thank the good folks at PWC for their latest survey of executives about innovation. The new article, optimistically entitled Unleashing the power of Innovation was recently published and surveyed approximately 250 senior executives about innovation.
Read MoreWhat a Decade of Innovation Teaches Us
After more than a decade of doing innovation work, there are some simple truths I’d like to impart. None of them are especially shocking, but for some reason, they need constant reinforcement. Almost every new innovation activity seems destined to experience some, if not all, of the same challenges and traps that previous innovation programs encountered, so it behooves us to document and illustrate these simple roadblocks if possible, to improve innovation outcomes and help companies just starting out to avoid some pitfalls.
Read MoreIs Innovation Signal or Noise ?
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge until one considers the question: what is the real signal? What is creating the noise? In many businesses today, there are several signals: noise conflicts. These include…
Read MoreYour Innovation Confidence Course
What we need is not to think of innovation as a lonely idea facing a huge set of obstacles. Rather, what we need is either 1) a clearly defined path for ideas to follow that will assess, develop and validate ideas effectively or 2) confident idea partners who are experienced in running the obstacle course.
Read MoreUnderstanding Emerging Innovation by Reviewing the Past
We tend to be very short-sighted, we corporate executives. Our lifespans are relatively brief, all things considered. There are over 240 years since the founding of the United States, and using a 20-year cycle for generations that suggest approximately 12 generations of people during that brief window. Most of us work for approximately 40 years, but we…
Read MoreShifting Budgets from Advertising to Innovation
OK, I don’t have a self-driving car and already I’m sick of hearing about them and their potential. Just like I don’t have a virtual reality headset made out of cardboard and an iPhone, but I’m tired of hearing about virtual reality. The reason I’m tired about hearing about VR and autonomous vehicles is that…
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