Very few businesses last. While we like to think we live in a particularly disruptive era, this has always been true. Entrepreneurs start businesses because they see opportunity and build skills, practices and processes to leverage it. Yet as the world changes, these strengths often become vulnerabilities.
The problem is that the past is not always a good guide to the future. Business models, even the successful ones, are designed for inertia. They are great for leveraging past insights, but are often resistant to change. Success does not, in fact, always breed more success, sometimes it breeds failure.
That’s why every business needs to innovate. Yet innovation is not, as some would have us believe, just about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about solving the problems you need to create a better future. What most fail to grasp is that a key factor of success is how you source problems, build a pipeline and, ultimately, choose which ones you will work on.
read more…
A recent survey by Deloitte of “aggressive adopters” of cognitive technologies found that 76% believe that they will “substantially transform” their companies within the next three years. There probably hasn’t been this much excitement about a new technology since the dotcom boom years in the late 1990s.
The possibilities would seem to justify the hype. AI isn’t just one technology, but a wide array of tools, including a number of different algorithmic approaches, an abundance of new data sources and advancement in hardware. In the future, we will see new computing architectures, like quantum computing and neuromorphic chips, propel capabilities even further.
Still, there remains a large gap between aspiration and reality. Gartner estimated that 85% of big data projects fail. There have also been embarrassing snafus, such as when Dow Jones reported that Google was buying Apple for $9 billion and the bots fell for it or Microsoft’s Tay chatbot went berserk on Twitter. Here’s how to transform the potential of AI into real results.
read more…
In a famous scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, a family friend takes aside Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, and whispers in a conspiratorial tone “Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” It’s seems quaint today, but back then plastics really were new and exciting.
If the movie had been set in another age, the advice to young Braddock would have been different. He might have been counseled to go into railroads or electronics or simply to “Go west young man!” Every age has things that seem novel and wonderful at the time, but tepid and banal to future generations.
Today, digital technology is all the rage because after decades of development it has become incredibly useful. Still, if you look closely, you can already see the contours of its inevitable descent into the mundane. We need to start preparing for a new era of innovation in which different technologies, like genomics, materials science and robotics rise to the fore.
read more…
Since the turn of the century, the US Military has been continually disrupted. Traditionally it was designed to fight conventional wars against great adversaries. Yet since 9/11 it has found itself fighting networks of loosely connected small groups that are able to continually evolve their tactics. That’s a very different kind of battle.
It’s a situation that most executives at major companies will recognize. Today, as the tempo and pace of technological change seems to be ever-increasing, a competitive threat can come from anywhere. As you ponder the competitive landscape, somebody at a kitchen table somewhere may be getting ready to eat your lunch.
Colonel Pete Newell is at the nexus of both worlds. As Director of the Rapid Equipping Force, he transformed how the Army was able to collaborate with external resources and reduce development time from years to months. He then helped develop the highly acclaimed Hacking 4 Defense program. Now, he’s bringing his innovation program to private industry.
read more…
Go to just about any conference today and you will hear a familiar tale of woe. A once great corporation, which had dominated its industry, fails to adapt and descends into irrelevance. The protagonists of these stories always come out looking more than a little bit silly, failing to recognize business trends that seem obvious.
The problem with these stories is that they are rarely true. Make no mistake, it takes a considerable amount of intelligence, ambition and drive to manage a large organization. The notion that these people overlooked what was obvious to everyone else is overly facile and simplistic. It’s also misleading.
Great companies do not fail because of a single decision or trend. The roots of disruption are always more complex than that. So by imagining CEOs to be morons, we neglect to look more closely at their demise and learn valuable lessons. The truth is that every business model fails eventually. We need to learn the true sources of failure if we are to overcome them.
read more…
On a cold February morning in 2013, agents from the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service rounded up 13 suspects in four states across the Northeast who allegedly stole over $200 million. It was a truly massive scheme, involving over 7,000 false identities and 1,800 “drop addresses” to collect all the loot.
What made this crime different than most is that there were no ordinary “victims.” Instead, the criminals used highly sophisticated schemes in order to create identities, build up credit scores and then take out loans and credit cards. They then used these instruments to buy merchandise which they could exchange for cash.
This type of “synthetic identity” crime is becoming more prevalent. As more effective security protocols are implemented, cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated and those that guard our financial system need to up their game as well. Yet it appears we are beginning to gain ground in this war and the story of synthetic identity shows how it can be won.
read more…
I was serving on an expert panel at a recent innovation conference and an attendee asked about the Semmelweis effect, the tendency for people to reject new evidence that contradicts established beliefs. He wanted to know how aspiring innovators can overcome inherent bias against new ideas.`
The effect gets its name from the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who pioneered hand washing to prevent infections in hospitals during the 1840s. However, he was unable to get the medical establishment to accept his idea and thousands, if not millions, died unnecessarily because of it.
The Semmelweis effect is very real. We do get trapped in existing paradigms and that often blinds us to important new information. The Semmelweis story, however, is considerably more nuanced than most people give it credit for. The truth is that much of the blame falls on Semmelweis himself. The real story shows how we can overcome resistance to new ideas.
read more…
Every business knows it needs to innovate. What isn’t so clear is how to go about it. There is no shortage of pundits, blogs and conferences that preach the gospel of agility, disruptive innovation, open innovation, lean startups or whatever else is currently in vogue. It can all be overwhelming.
The reality is that there is no one “true” path to innovation. In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that organizations of all shapes and sizes can be great innovators. Some are lean and nimble, while others are large and bureaucratic. Some have visionary leaders, others don’t. No one model prevails.
However, there are common principles that we can apply. While there is no “right way” to innovate, there are plenty of wrong ways. So perhaps the best way forward is to avoid the pitfalls that can undermine innovative efforts in your organization and kill promising new solutions. Here are five things every business should know about innovation.
All too often, stories about great innovators read like superhero movies. The protagonist goes on a holy quest, overcoming rivals and naysayers along the way. These tales may be inspiring, but they are rarely helpful. The truth is that great innovators are real people, with human flaws. None are perfect.
Einstein could be terribly cruel and his inability to let go of his idea that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” doomed his later career to irrelevance. Henry Ford dabbled in racism and anti-Semitism. Vannevar Bush, who did as much as anyone to build the modern age, engaged in behavior that would be considered corrupt today.
Yet it is often mistakes and failures that we can learn the most from. By understanding how great innovators struggled, we can learn how they overcame challenges to contribute something significant to the world. So when you hit the beach this summer, you might want to think about picking one of these up to learn how innovation really happens.
read more…
In the middle of the 20th century, IBM used its headquarters in New York City as a showroom of tomorrow. Passersby could look into the window and see the newest mainframe on display, promising an exciting technological future. It was the dawn of the computer age, but marketers were largely out of the picture.
It would be hard to explain the the “Mad Men” back in the 1960s that someday those big, hulking machines would shrink down small enough to fit in our pockets, that these devices would have screens and that they would, to a large extent, replace TVs as the dominant driver of commerce.
Today, as Moore’s Law is slowly petering to an end, we’re on the brink of a new era and, in time, marketing will be transformed once again in ways that are hard to see right now. Over the next decade marketers will need to begin to shift to the post-digital world of computing. This next transformation promises to be at least as revolutionary as the last one.
read more…
