3rd Annual Top 5 HBR Breakthrough ideas

... in which we winnow down Harvard Business Review's yearly list of 20 breakthrough ideas to a manageable 5.

1. The Business of Biomimicry, by Janine M. Benyus and Gunter A.M. Pauli. Many of the most important new innovations we'll see in 2009 and beyond will involve borrowing and inspiration from nature's processes.

2. Institutional Memory Goes Digital, by Gurdeep Singh Pall and Rita Gunther McGrath. What will happen when every word, gesture, etc., of business interactions are recorded and stored? [I'm most interested in the subset of this involving intentionally captured and signified narrative information for knowledge sharing. The Mistake Bank is an early stab at this idea.]

3. How Social Networks Work Best, by Alex Pentland. New research shows that collaborations work best when social networks are used differently for discovery and integration activities.

4. The Ikea Factor, by Michael I. Norton. Having a hand in building a product leads to a stronger emotional connection with it. [Does this say anything about self-service gas stations and supermarkets?]

5. Forget Citibank, Borrow From Bob, by John Sviokla, and Consumer Safety For Consumer Credit, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi. It's inevitable that the fallout of our financial crisis will be a radical restructuring and reinvention of the financial industry. And it's about time.


Related posts:
2008 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas
2007 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas

Female guru alert

The members of our list of overlooked female business gurus continue to spread their important ideas:

- Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD has published an article in the January Harvard Business Review ("Women and the Vision Thing") asserting that peers, subordinates & bosses see female leaders as equal to or superior to their male counterparts in every area except one--creating and articulating a strong vision.

- I just got in my hot little hands an advance copy of the new book by Rita Gunther McGrath (& collaborator Ian MacMillan), "Discovery-Driven Growth," which I'm very much looking forward to reading. (I've got to finish "War & Peace" soon!)

As a reminder, the rest of the list includes Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, Deborah Ancona of MIT, Traci Fenton of WorldBlu and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, also of HBS. Be sure to check out their work.

A salute to free thinking

By free I mean it doesn't cost anything. It's also the other kind of "free," too--unconstrained and bold.

What I'm talking about is the insight and information available today on blogs. It's absolutely remarkable what is on the net, as close as your browser or RSS reader. By any measure, it's tenfold or onehundredfold what the most curious reader had access to ten years ago.

I haven't canceled my newspapers yet, but not one of them (not even the Times) can provide a list of contributors this strong. Here is who I read every day, whose insights I cherish and who make me think new things:

Bob Sutton
Fred Wilson
Dave Stein
Andrew McAfee
James Surowiecki
George Packer
Doc Searls
Rita Gunther McGrath
Jill Konrath
Tim Berry
John Quelch
Nancy Baym
Andrew Meyer
John Jantsch
Ford Harding
Ulla-Maaria Engeström (Hobby Princess)
Dave Snowden
Cognitive Edge guest blog
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
Garr Reynolds

So... who am I missing? Who else should be on my RSS feed list?

"Innovator's Guide to Growth": readable, productive prescriptions for disruptive innovation

I didn't really understand Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" when I read it many years ago. Perhaps like a lot of people employed by large companies, I suffered "innovator's myopia." But after experiencing disruptive products like Skype, Linux and salesforce.com it started to make more sense to me.

Christensen and his followers are still preaching the disruptive innovation gospel, and now, with "The Innovator's Guide to Growth" I am finally getting the picture.

It's the size and shape of a textbook, and works as one. Written by Mark Johnson, Scott Anthony and Joseph Sinfield, along with Motorola's Elizabeth Altman, "The Innovator's Guide" provides a rigorous introduction and a process for nurturing disruptive innovation. It guides a company through identifying opportunities, developing ideas, devising strategies, and deploying them.

There are no magic bullets presented--the core strategy, to find innovations that fundamentally reshape markets, is still difficult for market leaders to follow. Leaders' instincts are to protect market share and "feature up" their products, precisely the wrong approaches to disrupt a market.

One tenet of disruptive innovation is to target "overshot" customers. These customers have grown disenchanted with the continual upgrades of a product and won't pay more for new features. It occured to me that users of Microsoft Windows Vista--a huge product that just isn't exciting anyone (and annoying many)--are just such overshot customers.

The chapter entitled "Mastering Emergent Strategies" was worth the price of the book alone. Referencing the work of Rita Gunther McGrath and alluding to managerial complexity as elaborated by Boone and Snowden in a recent HBR article, it lays out the case for an iterative approach to planning as opposed to an all-out march to a clearly-defined objective.

The authors define three critical steps for iterative planning: (1) identifying areas of uncertainty, (2) performing "smart experiments" and (3) adjusting and reflecting.

The rest of the book is similarly insightful. If you're an innovator, or need to be one, this book should stay on your bookshelf as a valuable reference for many years.

Related posts:
Use your strategy to drive your acquisitions and vice versa
Rita Gunther McGrath

Tags:
innovation, strategy, complexity, reading list

No female business gurus? Try this list

There was a fun article today in the Wall Street Journal that ranked the top business gurus by citation, Google hits and media mentions. Familiar names, like Gary Hamel, Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are in the top 5.

This paragraph, though, struck me:

One notable absence from the top 20: women. The 2003 list included one woman, Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, among its top 20, but she fell in the new ranking. "I would love to hear more female speakers," says Kristi Wetherington, CEO of Capital Institutional Services Inc., a Dallas independent institutional brokerage firm.

So who would be on my list of top female gurus? How about these:

1. Herminia Ibarra, INSEAD. Powerful thinking on career management and networking.

2. Deborah Ancona, MIT. Authority on teamwork (her book "X-Teams" was one of my favorite books of 2007).

3. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School. Organizational behavior, including the value of candor and dissent in the workplace.

4. Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia University. Practical yet profound ideas on leadership and innovation.

5. Traci Fenton, WorldBlu. A tireless advocate and thinker on workplace democracy.

And of course Ms. Kanter.

Related posts:

"Personal Networks: useful anywhere" (Ibarra)

"Blame it on the I-Team" (Ancona)

"Great innovation requires great teams..." (Edmondson)

"A more realistic way to profit from innovation" (McGrath)

"WorldBlu 2008 List of Democratic Workplaces released" (Fenton)

Kanter's Innovation Pyramid"

Tags:
gurus, thinkers, Wall Street Journal

Top 10 articles of the year

10 (tie). "Consumed: Boxed Set (the Buddha Machine)," Rob Walker, New York Times Magazine, July 29. The story of the most innovative music package in recent memory.

10 (tie). "Beyond Pokémon: Nintendo DS Goes To School in Japan," Yukari Iwatani Kane. Wall Street Journal, July 11. Video games are not just for goofing around anymore.

9. "Do Startups Really Need Business Plans?" Kelly Spors. Wall Street Journal, January 9. Going against the conventional wisdom.

8. "How Managers' Everyday Decisions Create--or Destroy--Your Company's Strategy," Joseph Bower and Clark Gilbert. Harvard Business Review, February.

7. "How Leaders Create and Use Networks," Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter. Harvard Business Review, January. There were several fascinating articles on using personal networks this year. This was the best.

6. "Strategic Insight in Three Circles," Joel Urbany and James Davis. Harvard Business Review, November. Creating and communicating a strategy using a Venn diagram.

5. "The Value Captor’s Process: Getting the Most out of Your New Business Ventures," Rita Gunther McGrath and Thomas Keil. Harvard Business Review, May. Companies can do a lot better with products that don't make the final grade, if they employ some basic tactics to get value from them.

4. "Can a Company Be Run As a Democracy?" Jaclyne Badal. Wall Street Journal, April 23. The subject of a growing number of articles this year. Perhaps this is telling us something.

3. "A Leader's Framework for Decisionmaking," Dave Snowden and Mary Boone. Harvard Business Review, November. How to navigate the maze of business problems, from simple to chaotic, using the Cynefin framework.

2. "Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China," and other articles by Walt Bogdanich et al. on the subject of tainted Chinese products. New York Times, May-October.

1. "At the Pentagon, an 'Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure,'" Jonathan Karp. Wall Street Journal, May 14. How one part of the US government uses stories of "worst practices" to help guide people in their ethical decisionmaking.

top 10

A more realistic way to profit from innovation

Most big companies' innovation processes look like this: sort through a host of new-venture proposals, select the one with the biggest payback and lowest risk, and fund it through launch. Establish ongoing "go/no-go" checkpoints to ensure the venture is meeting its projections and, if it's not, kill it.

While it sounds reasonable, this kind of process contributes to the poor return on innovation investment in many businesses. So say Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School and Thomas Keil of Helsinki University of Technology in an article in the May Harvard Business Review ("The Value Captor's Process" - link $$).

The key defect in standard innovation processes is a belief that the initial business plan for a venture is unalterable and that the only success is fulfilling the business plan as originally conceived. This leaves no room for the reality of an innovation process--which is that there may be several possible successful outcomes, and achieving any one will add value to the company.

McGrath and Keil suggest several other ways to extract value from new ventures if "Plan A" doesn't come about:

• Recycling. To entrepreneurs, shifting course based on new possibilities or issues discovered during the development process is second nature. To large companies, it's a very difficult task. Of one new-business venture, the authors write, "The applications that turned out to be significant profit generators were not on the original list of possibilities."
  
  
• Spinning off/licensing. If your company can't make a go of it, perhaps an outsider can, with the company potentially retaining some ownership.

• Spinning in. If the venture doesn't stand alone, it may be a useful extension to an existing business unit.
  
  
• Salvaging. At worst, put the learnings and technology gained in the venture to work somewhere in the company.

The authors also focus on an alternate approach to new-venture planning. They write:

An alternative to the go/no-go approach is to make learning a central purpose of the venture plan. In a discovery-driven plan, measuring progress consists of validating assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible and then revising the plan as necessary at key milestones.

Such planning allowed Texas Instruments to enter the RFID market very early, testing the market and value propositions inexpensively and cautiously, but then being prepared when large-scale markets for the products emerged. "Had TI based its decision to invest in the venture on whether the market size and potential payback were sufficiently large and the level of risk sufficiently low," write McGrath and Keil, "the company probably would not have funded the initial effort."

(Photo by lusi via stock.xchng)

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