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EXPAND: How to Engineer Disruptive Ideas

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, Strategic thinking

Your ability to innovate depends on your ability to conceive of new strategic options, which in turn is a function of the number and variety of stories you recognize. When you face a challenge and ask, “What does Porter’s Five Forces tell me to do?” or “What does Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation model dictate?” you end up defaulting to what others – your competitors, your peers – would do as well. Instead, use our IDEAS framework – specifically the “Expand” step – as the key to getting out of that rut.

27 Aug

DISSECT: How to Reveal Overlooked Opportunities for Growth

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, Strategic thinking

In our last blog, we argued that great strategies stem from impossible questions, typically a long-term one (e.g., Tesla’s how to create an electric vehicle the every-day consumer can afford?) and a near-term one (e.g., today Tesla’s might be how to establish the capacity to manufacture at scale?).

13 Aug

IMAGINE: 5 Steps Toward the Strategic Power of Impossible

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, Strategic thinking

Why are so many breakthrough strategic possibilities killed off before they see the light of day? Years of research have provided us insight into the mistakes teams make that tend to kill off the most exciting ideas.

01 Aug

GE and the Folly of Isolating Innovations

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation

General Electric just announced it is selling off GE Digital, the much-hyped software business based in California and a keystone in GE’s strategy to transform itself from an unfocused conglomerate (in financial services and media) into a digital player that would usher in the next industrial era, creating the “industrial internet of things.”

19 Jul

Five Shortcuts to Breakthrough Ideas

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, Strategic thinking

We are passionate about understanding how the strategic conversations you hold – in boardrooms or hallways – can lead to breakthrough ideas … and why so often they don’t. We have found five mistakes teams often make that tend to kill off the most exciting strategic possibilities, and we’ve come up with a way to counter each mistake, called the IDEAS framework (Imagine, Dissect, Expand, Analyze, Sell).

In this article, I share this framework with you, in addition to a special announcement about a new program we are launching this month (see below).

18 Jun

Implementing Change from the Ground Up: The Power of First Steps to Create a Movement

Posted by Shannon Wallis in Innovation, Leadership

I started my career in the 90s, as an external management consultant who worked on the business process reengineering aspects of large systems integrations. Our clients would spend millions of dollars reengineering the organization, but they often did not implement the changes. My personal experience reflected what research indicated: 80% of change projects fail.

05 Jun

You Are Not Being Disrupted: Distinguishing Disruption from Turbulence

Posted by Outthinker in Uncategorized

In a sun-filled boardroom overlooking lower Manhattan, I was sitting with a group of chief strategy officers for part of our Outthinker Roundtable discussion. Professor George Day, leading expert on innovation and marketing, and faculty member at Wharton Business School, shared a concept about disruption that has been infecting my thoughts ever since.

29 May

Top 10 Sources of Innovation: Why Your Accelerator Barely Makes the List

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, People

US corporations invest more than $350 billion a year on innovation through R&D efforts. So it’s easy to assume that such formal efforts propel innovation more than any other factor.

01 May

Scout, Juggle, and Ignore Technology to Out-Innovate the Competition: Lessons from CSAA

Posted by Outthinker in Innovation, People

Debbie Brackeen was in the “innovation” business before it was even called “innovation.” After completing her undergrad at Stanford University, she found herself in the heart of Silicon Valley. She spent her first years at Apple followed by stints at a variety of high-tech companies from HP to venture-baked start-ups. Today she is the chief strategy and innovation officer at CSAA Insurance Group, one of the largest AAA insurers in the world.

06 Apr

Execute with CLARITY

Posted by Shannon Wallis in Leadership, People

You stepped into the future…but has it felt more like you stepped off a cliff? Some of the most spectacular strategic failures have been due to poor execution. Unfortunately, the momentum of vision is often short-lived as the reality of the complexity of execution begins to set in. Since 1955, only 57 companies have maintained a position in the Fortune 500 while nearly 2,000 companies have come and gone during that same time period.