Team Profiles

Alex Slawsby, Manager

Meet Alex

Alex Slawsby is a Manager with Innosight. While a member of the Innosight team, Alex has worked on engagements in the information technology, wireless, healthcare, and defense industries. He has experience creating new growth businesses, assessing M&A opportunities, and creating internal organizational structures that enable innovation. Alex is also Innosight’s IT Lead, overseeing the Company’s operational and strategic uses of information technology.

Prior to joining Innosight, Alex spent more than 4 years with the technology industry analysis firm IDC as a mobile and wireless device analyst. From 2000 through 2005, Alex was one of the most quoted mobile and wireless device analysts in the world, appearing on CNN, Fox News, NPR, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. After leaving IDC, Alex interned at IDG Ventures before attending the MIT Sloan School of Management. While a student at MIT, Alex interned at Innosight.

Alex received a BA in political science from Brown University in 2000 and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2007. While at Sloan, Alex was awarded the Seley Scholarship for outstanding leadership, professional promise, high academic achievement, and contribution to MIT Sloan. He was also co-president of the MIT Innovation Club. His master’s thesis, Collective Innovation, examined how organizations can leverage collective intelligence, openness, and Web 2.0 technologies to innovate more effectively.

Most Memorable Innosight Moment

My most memorable Innosight moment took place, in fact, while I was at IDC. I was chosen to work with Innosight in 2003 to develop a common viewpoint on the evolution of the personal digital assistant (PDA) space. During the project, I had the opportunity to learn Innosight's approach to analyzing disruptive innovation, and for the first time was able to view my research through a new set of incredibly powerful analytical lenses. I was extremely impressed by my interactions with Innosight—I learned how to identify true customer pain points, a structured approach to analyzing the characteristics of competition, and gained a new understanding of the dynamics of innovation. I will always remember that project as a highlight of my time with IDC, and it was my first choice to join Innosight upon graduation from the Sloan School of Management.

Favorite Innovation

While all disruptive innovations are fascinating and powerful in their own ways, few have created value for their consumers like the advertising-supported online business model. Historically, consumers were forced to give up something of value to acquire goods and services—money, time, or effort, for example. The simple notion that one could receive valuable services in return for viewing advertisements is an extremely powerful one. Consider Google Search and GMail, MySpace and Facebook, YouTube and the Internet Movie Database, ImageShack and Flickr—the list goes on and on. Imagine if we had to pay for access to those sites?

What Alex Recommends

Alex co-authored Is the Party Ending for Wireless with Clayton M. Christensen and Scott D. Anthony in Forbes, and authored Harnessing the Power of Collective Innovation in Strategy & Innovation.

What Alex Has Written

More Powerful Than Twitter

AUG 19 2010
Case Study: Retail Startup Nau Tries Innovating for Social Consciousness, With Mixed Results

SEP 10 2008
Harnessing the Power of Collective Innovation, Part 2

APR 1 2008
Harnessing the Power of Collective Innovation, Part 1

FEB 1 2008
Is the Party Ending for Wireless?

Forbes.com: Signals suggest that wireless providers who aren't careful might find themselves victims of a devastating disruptive assault from emerging technologies and business models....
MAR 20 2007