Sometime ago I already wrote about Starbucks, outlining my theory about why the giant coffee house is not present in Italy (click here to read). Looks like Starbucks it not passing a good moment after an internal memo leaked into the blogosphere (click here to read the memo). Basically the memo outlines Howard Schultz’ fears … Continue reading Starbucks: disruptor or disrupted?
Category: Innovation
Innovation and Geography
Does geographical locations play an important role upon innovation? Certainly, and the New York Times recently published an article outlining why phenomena like the iPod, Google or eBay could only happen in Silicon Valley.
Innovation, back to the basics
There is a very interesting article over BusinessWeek outlining the hype that the innovation term has gained lately. Most of the companies around the world are declaring that innovation is a building block of their strategy, but few of those companies actually grasp the true dynamics of innovation.
Innovation through Collaboration
Mass collaboration and open innovation models are widely employed on “new economy” segments. Just think about Linux and the open source phenomenon or companies like Amazon.com and IBM that created products with the inputs of large third-party developer communities.
Innovation and Economic Prosperity
Last December the UK Design Council held in London the Competitiveness Summit 2006, with the main purpose of evaluating the implementation of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business. The CoxReview, published in November 2005, had a series of guidelines to foster creativity and innovation in UK.
Can Porn affect Innovation?
All those factors certainly helped JVC, but there is arguably another one, more obscure, that influenced the final result: the porn industry went with the VHS format. The early home video rental stores were responsible for part of Betamax’s decline, and those stores carried a lot of pornographic content.
Top 10 Disrupters of 2006
The Forbes magazine published an interesting list called “Top 10 Disrupters of 2006”. Bear in mind that the entries on the list can not necessarily be classified as disruptive innovations according to Clayton Christense’s traditional term (despite the fact that Christensen was among the panelists who voted for the list). They are rather breakthrough ideas and initiatives that had an impact upon the economic or social landscape in 2006. According to the article “our disrupters aren’t just companies who played the game and won; they are people or technologies that changed the game completely.”
Innovation lessons learned in 2006
A couple of weeks ago I announced that Chuck Frey was collecting “innovation lessons learned in 2006”. The Innovation Tools website already published the result, with almost 60 answers. Below you will find the most interesting ones (in my opinion):
Is ambition the mother of innovation?
If necessity is the mother of invention can we say that ambition is the mother of innovation? The most famous inventions that our society witnessed appeared as solutions for specific problems. The train appeared when the chariots were no longer suitable for covering long distance travels. The telephone was developed as soon as people started living scattered across the country. When the steam engine was no longer able to sustain the growing necessity for energy man came up the explosion engine based on fossil fuels.
Innovation and Baseball
Clayton Christensen just published an interesting article over Forbes magazine titled “An Innovation Home Run”. According to Christensen the major innovation is coming from the deeper connection that clubs are building with their core baseball consumers.