Competing Against Luck

A Fast Company TOP TEn BUsiness BOOK for 2016 “Clayton Christensen’s books on innovation are mandatory reading at Netflix.” – Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO, Netflix For many companies, innovation is still hit or miss. They spend millions compiling the data to figure out what their customers want, but they often achieve only modest incremental… Read More

Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? Product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to hone in on the job the customer is trying to get done.… Read More

Five Trends of the Future Consumer

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies’ Summer University, “The Future Consumer and Marketplace[1].” CIFS is an international, apolitical, and not-for-profit organization that is one of Scandinavia’s largest Future Studies think tanks. Founded in 1970 by Thorkil Kristensen, a former OECD Secretary-General and Danish Finance Minister, the Institute is […]… Read More

Whole Foods’ Misguided Play for Millennials

The news that Whole Foods will open a separate chain of stores designed to appeal to millennials stopped me mid-aisle. According to Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb, these future stores will feature “modern, streamlined design, innovative technology, and a curated selection” of lower-priced organic and natural foods. As millennials would write—facepalm. My dismay is not […]… Read More

Circumstances for the Success of the Apple Watch

First, a confession. I am not a member of the Cult of Apple. Yes, I own an iPhone and an iMac and use a MacBook Pro and, occasionally, an iPad. But I own them primarily for practical reasons – I needed a portable device (iPod then iPhone) to listen to my playlists, and my husband […]… Read More

Disruption Is Not About Slaying Giants but about Serving New Customers

Mark W. Johnson, co-founder and senior partner at Innosight: You can go to a conference called Disrupt, get a degree in disruption from USC, and the word “disruptive” seems to appear in the mission statement of an accelerating number of startups. At the same time, the backlash against the ubiquity of the term has gotten […]… Read More