INNOBLOG

Scott D. Anthony's The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, has made a number of "best of" lists for 2009. So far the book has appeared on Business Week's "Best Innovation and Design Books 2009" list and on Hudson Booksellers "Best Books of 2009." The book was also a finalist in the Business category for USA Book News and was one of CIO Insight's "Best IT Business Books of 2009." Congratulations, Scott!

Helen Walters, BusinessWeek.com's Innovation and Design Channel editor, noted in a blog post this afternoon that Scott Anthony, formerly president of Innosight's consulting business, has taken on the Managing Director post at Innosight Ventures. Innosight Ventures is an Innosight-owned venture building and investing business with offices in Singapore, India, and the U.S. As Helen writes, this is a big deal for Scott, since he and his family will be relocating to Singapore in 2010. But it's also a big deal for Innosight, as Innosight Ventures allows us to practice what we preach: identify key areas we think are ripe for disruption, and build sustainable businesses in those areas. There'll be more in coming issues of Strategy & Innovation on the businesses Innosight Ventures is launching.

The well-known marketing publication MarketingSherpa has just published a Strategy & Innovation case study (available free for about 10 days and only to subscribers afterward). The article describes our project last year to transition Strategy & Innovation from a bimonthly, paid, print publication to a biweekly, free, online publication. Innosight Marketing Director Gretchen Rice and I spoke with the MarketingSherpa reporter about why we felt we needed to make such a transition and how we did it.

Many of you are Strategy & Innovation subscribers and thus are aware of some of the things we told the MarketingSherpa reporter — that we felt if our priority was getting into the conversation about innovation and being able to share our insights, we needed to be able to distribute them more freely in a form that people could pass on. We're glad that it's worked out so well.

If you're a relatively new subscriber to Strategy & Innovation (or don't subscribe at all) you may want to go to the S&I page on our website and delve into our archives. There's a wealth of information in these articles that we're happy to share with you. Enjoy!

(Note: If you have not previously registered at our site, you will need to register once — a free and relatively painless process — to be able to access the content.)

After the rush of reviews for The Innovator's Guide to Growth that resulted from the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour, we were pleased to see another review of the book published last week by Jim McGee of the FastForward Enterprise 2.0 blog. McGee reviews the book from the point of view of a technology industry innovator, which is a bit different perspective than that of most of the other reviews the book has gotten. It's worth looking at if that perspective is of interest to you. An excerpt:

Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.

The articles from the Oct. 15 edition of Strategy & Innovation are now online. This issue leads off with an article on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, interviewed by Mark Johnson, in which Hastings talks about about disruption, emergent strategy, and why Netflix is in the movie-choosing business rather than the movie-delivery business. There's also a new Innovator's Insight column from Scott D. Anthony on the new Plastic Logic e-reader, and a Disrupt-O-Meter on space tourism I did, comparing XCOR and Virgin Galactic. If you'd like to get the actual email newsletter, with introductions and links to each story, go to our login page and register.

Back in May at the Front End of Innovation conference, Innosight president Scott Anthony interviewed Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley in a keynote presentation. We ran a print excerpt from that presentation in our July-August issue, and Forbes.com picked it up as well. The interview was reprised recently in a new video that has just been posted on the P&G website as part of their 2008 annual report (the video link is toward the bottom of the left-hand nav bar). In the wide-ranging interview Lafley discusses the management of innovation, customer-focused innovation, innovation portfolios, disruptive business models, growth, and how to lead for game-changing innovation. It's well worth watching.

Greg Daines from Ideanomics, who participated in last week's Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for The Innovator's Guide to Growth, has posted a three-part video interview with one of the book's authors, Mark Johnson. You can see the interview at these links:

Part One — Why the book was written and who it's for

Part Two — What is essential to disruptive innovation projects

Part Three — What are the most common misconceptions about disruptive innovation

This week the Innovator's Guide to Growth was featured on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour. Five different bloggers reviewed the book and interviewed the lead authors, Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson. We'd like to thank all the bloggers as well as Paul Williams, the organizer of Post2Post, who blogs at Idea Sandbox.

Here's the wrap-up on who posted what when, with links:

Monday:  Gordon Graham of Broken Bulbs posted an interview with Scott Anthony about the book's potential application in a broad range of circumstances including small business, business schools, and in what industries Scott expects to see disruptive innovation in the future.

Tuesday:  Greg Daines of Ideanomics posted a review of the book and promises to post video of his interview with Mark Johnson soon. Meanwhile, he called Innovator's Guide to Growth "the best business book of 2008."

Wednesday:  Josh Kutticherry of FutureThinkTank posted Part One of an interview Scott Anthony (second part, including an audio interview, coming next Wednesday), in which he asks Scott about ideation and inspiration, and poses the $100 million question: "What would you do with your copmany if someone gave you $100 million to grow it?"

Thursday:  Idris Mouttee of Innovation Playground posted an interview with Scott Anthony about special corporate innovation teams, overshooting, targeting nonconsumers, and innovation metrics.

Friday: Gregg Fraley at Gregg Fraley Creativity & Innovation posted a review calling the book "the new bible for innovation managers and leaders" and praising its "it’s womb-to-tomb" approach to innovation management and process.

And, the book tour lives on past its allotted week, as well — next Wednesday, Oct. 1, Josh Kutticherry will post the second part of his Scott Anthony interview and Doug Stevenson (Fraley's partner in "The Innovise Guys" blog and podcast series) will post a review on The Innovise Guys blog. We'll also be watching for Greg Daines' video of his Mark Johnson interview, and will link to that when it's up.

Back in April we announced the launch of our new website, complete with the 2007 archives of Strategy & Innovation. Now we have even more good news for those looking for resources on disruptive innovation — we now have available for free on our website the archives of all the Innosight-owned content of Strategy & Innovation. That includes all issues from September-October 2005 through May-June 2008 (we are in negotiations with Harvard Business Press to complete the archives all the way back to the 2003 launch).

The launch of the archives is part of a larger set of changes for Strategy & Innovation. The July-August issue, which will ship to subscribers in two weeks, will be the last print, paid-subscription issue of the newsletter. Starting in September, we will publish a smaller, biweekly newsletter — again, for free.  If you're interested, please register at our website.

Also, Innosight has just launched the Innosight YouTube channel with 14 videos of Innosight partners Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, and Joe Sinfield talking about disruptive innovation and their book The Innovator's Guide to Growth. The book also has a Facebook page with an ongoing discussion.Check it out!

We were pleased to note that InnoBlog is included in the new Innovation site of the new news-aggregator Alltop, and even more pleased when we learned that getting listed there is often the result of reader requests. Thank you to the people (or person!) who suggested us.

Alltop launched in January, with the stated goal is to "collect stories from 'all the top' sites on the web....At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs. You can think of an Alltop site as a 'digital magazine rack' of the Internet." In Innosight terms, AllTop is trying to satisfy the customer job "help me find relevant information on the Internet," a job that many sites are trying to satisfy in a variety of ways. It's too early to tell how well Alltop will do, but it's a good sign that the site was launched by Nononina, the company owned by uber-enterpreneur Guy Kawasaki. Nononia's last start-up, Truemors, was just sold a few weeks ago to Vancouver-based "crowd-powered media" platform NowPublic.

Wall Street Journal reporter Wendy Bounds wrote about Alltop here. And just for fun, this link goes to a drawing of how Alltop works compared to how Google works, by Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures.

Today is the official launch of The Innovator's Guide to Growth, so in addition to Amazon, you should be able to find it now at your local live-action, in-person bookstore. To recap: this Harvard Business Press book is the latest in the series exploring disruptive innovation that was started by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997 and continued in Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution in 2003. The Innovator's Guide to Growth was written by Innosight's president Scott D. Anthony, co-founder and chairman Mark W. Johnson, and partner Joseph V. Sinfield, along with Elizabeth J. Altman, vice president of strategy and business development in Motorola’s Mobile Devices business. The book has a foreword by Clayton Christensen that can be downloaded free here.  HBP marked the occasion today by issuing a press release that features links to goodies such as video interviews and the book's Facebook page.

The Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, which will be published July 1 by Harvard Business Press, is now available through online booksellers such as Amazon.com. This book is the latest in the series exploring disruptive innovation that was started by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997 and continued in Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution in 2003. The Innovator's Guide to Growth was written by Innosight's president Scott D. Anthony, co-founder and chairman Mark W. Johnson, and partner Joseph V. Sinfield, along with Elizabeth J. Altman, vice president of strategy and business development in Motorola’s Mobile Devices business. Thebook has a foreword by Clayton Christensen that can be downloaded free here. That's just one of many tools and resources available at the book's newly launched website. Check it out, as well as the reviews, which are starting to show up on blogs and on Amazon.com.

If you read this blog at its web location (www.innosight.com/blog or www.innoblog.com) you will have noticed a design change as of last Friday. It's just the tip of the iceberg, though -- we at Innosight are proud to announce the launch of our newly improved, completely redesigned website, innosight.com. If you read this blog in an RSS reader, we invite you to surf over and look at our new site.

Besides being prettier and more user-friendly, the site now includes a great deal more usable and useful information on innovation, particularly on Innosight's approach.

Also, for the first time we are making back issues and individual articles of our bimonthly newsletter, Strategy & Innovation, available publicly -- and for free! Issues and articles that are older than six months old are avaliable free, while issues and articles that are newer than six months old are available only to subscribers (in print format). Currently we have S&I content for all of 2007 -- all six issues -- available in the archive. (Note that the old Strategy & Innovation website now redirects to the S&I index page on the new innosight.com.)

Also available in free archives is Innovators' Insights -- our biweekly email newsletter that presents analysis of the latest business trends and developments as seen through the disruptive-innovation lens. Currently the Innovators' Insight archives are complete back through 2006.

And, our website archive of research papers and articles (including links to articles published externally) is complete.

We invite you to explore our new site. If you find something that doesn't work, please do let us know so we can fix it! All comments, good and bad, can be sent to this email address: inquiries@innosight.com .

Join Scott Anthony for a FREE Webinar on Thursday, June 15th at 11:30am EDT.

Enroll Now!

In the complex sport of American football, teams rely on playbooks as thick as the Manhattan phone directory. But when it comes to creating innovative growth businesses--which is at least as complicated as professional football--most companies have not developed detailed game plans. Indeed, many managers have concluded that a fog enshrouds the world of innovation, obscuring high-potential opportunities.

This article summarizes Innosights in-the-field work helping companies create growth through innovation to suggest that companies that take the right actions can in fact penetrate this fog. Using examples from companies such as Procter & Gamble, Intuit, Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Dow Corning, Teradyne, and Motorola, the article describes straightforward steps companies can take to more predictably create new growth businesses.

By creating a playbook for new growth, using it to identify the best opportunities, investing a little to learn a lot, and changing the corporate discourse, companies can develop a process that produces high-quality innovations more quickly and with sharply lower up-front investment.

Innosight is holding a one-day, cross-company workshop that will go over the basic disruptive innovation principles and how to put the principles into action. This seminar is a cost-effective way to train you or your team in the principles and can be a vehicle for a team that is struggling with a disruptive problem to learn a new way to problem-solve.

Scott Anthony, co-author of Seeing What's Next, will be running the seminar along with fellow partner Joe Sinfield. They will lead the group through presentations, interactive discussions and small group exercises.

The day has been designed to help you develop the capabilities you need to create innovation-driven growth within your organization and to equip you with tangible tools and techniques to do so.

For more information or to register click here.