This week world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen are discussing possibilities and solutions for the problems posed by climate change. Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, whose recent "Harvard Business Review" article explored the ways in which systems-level innovation could help the clean-tech industry develop more quickly, have applied some of that same thinking to climate change. Their idea is presented in our lead article: The U.S. should build a “green city” somewhere in the Midwest, a systems-level experiment in innovation similar to Masdar, currently being built in Abu Dhabi.
In this issue we also feature another Mark W. Johnson article, this one focused on the ideas in his upcoming book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal. Johnson discusses why business model innovation is critical to master, and why some companies won't be able to master it.
Also featured is a lighter piece from Julia Silverman, applying the lessons she learned as an Innosight intern to her startup venture, sOccket. Here is an excerpt:
My time as an intern at Innosight this past summer was uniquely illuminating, since I myself am an entrepreneur. I have been working for the past year with a team of four Harvard undergrads to develop a business around a portable generator device called the sOccket. It’s a soccer ball with a little something extra: the capacity to harness the kinetic energy from game play for later use as electrical power. An outlet lies flush with the ball’s surface so that users can plug appliances directly into the ball.
The sOccket is aimed at the developing world where electricity is unreliable, if not totally absent. So, before I even knew what “disruptive innovation” really meant, our sOccket team was already gunning to serve nonconsumers – those who don’t have financial or logistical access to even the most basic version of a product.
From the Innoblog, Innosight's Krystin Stafford discusses what it takes for companies to effectively "borrow" a successful business model and apply it to another industry in "It's like Netflix for..."
