Every great innovation looks bad at some point in time: Scott Anthony

By Scott D. Anthony

When they heard he was moving from Boston to Singapore, Scott Anthony's venture capitalist friends made him a wager: 90% of all major innovations over the next ten years will come from Silicon Valley, they said, so he wasn't doing a very smart thing, shifting base to Asia. Anthony could have bet a million bucks, but he did more.

The managing director of Innosight Ventures went ahead staked his future on Asian innovation and moved his company, himself and his family out of the USA. "America is a great, influential country and will remain so for a long time, but I believe at least 40% of major innovations will come from outside the USA in the next decade," he says.

A former consultant with McKinsey with an MBA from Harvard, Anthony is a protégé of innovation guru Clayton Christensen, with whom he co-authored Seeing What's Next: using the theories of innovation to predict industry change. Now he's researching for a book on what he calls 'the first mile'—the gap between a business plan and an actual business—which has been found to be the most problematic period in the innovation process.

"People think successful innovation is all about creativity, but the inspiration truly is just 1% of the process. Having a plan on paper is one thing. Execution is the real challenge," he says.

Read the full article on Economic Times