Innovation

Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused...

A recent edition of Fortune describes innovations in computer gaming that are likely to be as disruptive to incumbent players like Electronic Arts and Activision as the move toward cloud computing is to providers of shrink-wrapped software. While the incumbents have been engaged in the innovation equivalent of an arms race – ever more powerful […]

Disruption is no longer just coming from the low end.

A few years ago, I was at a conference listening to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talk about how he runs his company on the theory that consumers will trade the quality of an experience for the convenience of getting it. The comment instantly triggered a whole puzzle to auto-assemble in my head. In two decades […]

Entrepreneurs sit on the sidelines for fear of innocently running afoul of the law.

Tim Cook is on track to be the next Steve Ballmer.

Nowhere in a company is the need for coordination more acute than between the people who are responsible for product design and those responsible for manufacturing. As Daniel E. Whitney argued in these pages recently (“Manufacturing by Design,” July–August 1988), most companies have operated for years in an environment where design and manufacturing communicate infrequently, […]

What one executive learned from building an app.

It's central to self-improvement.

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of potentially valuable innovations flop because the companies sponsoring them were using the fundamentally wrong logic in managing them. For instance, as Clayton Christensen recently described in the Harvard Business Review, they insist on valuing projects in terms of Net Present Value. A different approach, we’ve argued, is […]

Some years ago, doing some research for our book MarketBusters, my colleague Ian MacMillan and I ran across some interesting experiments Progressive Insurance was doing to change the business model in the car insurance market. The idea was that, rather than basing one’s insurance bill on demographic factors such as how expensive your car is […]

Challenged by world-class competitors, manufacturing companies in the United States have greatly improved their product development efforts as well as...

Inspiration is the engine of change.

To survive over the long haul, a company must reinvent itself periodically, jumping from the flattening end of one business performance curve to the rising...

Upstarts can face daunting odds when they challenge incumbents. Those that succeed know there's a method to their disruption. And it's one any company...

I was running along the six-mile loop in Central Park on a cold winter day when I passed the southern most end of the park where I noticed a large number...

Companies say they want breakthrough products, but most are far more adept at making incremental improvements to existing lines. A pioneering division at 3M successfully navigated a process that leads to breakthrough thinking.

by Lauren Keller Johnson

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen

Lessons from Geisinger Health's four-stage approach.