STRATEGY & INNOVATION
STRATEGY & INNOVATION offers articles to stimulate thinking and accelerate action, allowing readers to untangle the organizational challenges that can stymie innovation and go behind the scenes to see the operational tactics that leading organizations use to get their hot new ideas to market.
Strategy & Innovation
Current Issue
Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Innovation?
A different set of skills is required for open and collaborative innovation
A different set of skills is required for open and collaborative innovation
Boeing, P&G, and IBM illustrate how approaches toward innovation have changed considerably in the last few years. Companies worldwide have embraced open innovation and more collaborative forms of innovation. Instead of assuming they can create everything on their own, companies are seeking external partners to co-create future products and services. This move toward open innovation requires a new mindset and a new set of skills; it is no longer enough to just be a good project manager, researcher, engineer — or leader.
Also in this Issue
- Innovators' Insights: Sick Economy Visits Doctors
By Krystin Stafford
Recent press coverage suggests that the spending trade-offs consumers are making as they deal with the current economic climate have changed. Where previously some consumers had been cutting back on their daily Starbucks coffee or nixing their annual family vacation, now many consumers in dire financial straits are trimming healthcare expenses. Some patients have been forced to cancel their health insurance, delay necessary medical procedures, or even to forgo medications. Viewed through Innosight’s lenses, patient jobs-to-be-done like “keep my mortgage payment current” now compete with “take care of my health” for priority, and the mortgage is winning. This in turn presents quite a challenge for physicians: how to minimize a drop in their revenues while ensuring that their patients get quality care? - Disrupt-O-Meter: RingCentral Digital Line vs. Microsoft Office Communicator
By Renee Hopkins Callahan
Two main sets of competitors are fighting it out in the business VoIP space – one set focused on VoIP for medium to large enterprises, while another set is focused on the small-to-medium business (SMB) market. In the enterprise group, Microsoft introduced its Unified Communications line of Office Communicator servers and software in October 2007, and among other competitors is fighting with Cisco over whether VoIP will be software-based or network-based. Meanwhile, good-enough services for SMBs have become quite good, with Ring Central’s Digital Line service leading this pack. We wonder – is tiny start-up RingCentral better positioned for growth in the enterprise than Microsoft, which historically has owned the enterprise? - Emerging Technology Watch
New Discovery Enables Simple, Inexpensive, and Efficient Storage of Solar Power
MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera and post-doc Matthew Kanan recently unveiled a discovery that may represent a major energy breakthrough: a new compound that promises to enable large-scale adoption of truly decentralized, at-home solar power. The catalyst Nocera and Kanan discovered represents the crucial new component of a simple, inexpensive, and reportedly highly efficient water electrolysis system with negligible maintenance and replacement costs. - From the InnoBlog
Election 2008: A Tale of Disruptive Politics
Listening to the analysts during last night’s televised election results shows, I too was struck by what we can learn from the two efforts — more specifically how the principles of innovation were so clearly in evidence in this election. A few of the key models we advocate to drive corporate growth were applied by the Obama camp to generate a significant win, while in contrast, McCain did everything we would expect from one about to be disrupted.
Video, Social Media Innovate the Concept of Prototyping
Ph.D. candidate Johnny Chung Lee posted a YouTube video last December showing how the Nintendo Wii remote controller could transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display. So far, the video, which has been seen more than six million times, helped Lee get a job with Microsoft and helped him get listed in this year's MIT Technology Review Young Innovators Under 35. Lee's choice of YouTube to disseminate information about his invention was perhaps more innovative than what he actually invented.
Dash Is Dead: Long Live Dash!
Dash Express distinguished itself in a very crowded field with its ability to aggregate data about users’ positions and speeds to generate real-time, accurate traffic information. However, Dash is now undergoing a complete overhaul of its business model: it will no longer sell its own branded devices and will focus instead on business-to-business sales of its software platform. If nothing else, this rapid death of a new device serves as a further warning of the dangers faced by new entrants with great ideas seeking to improve on existing offerings in sustaining ways. This is a welcome change, and was a foreseeable one.