Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jun 29, 2012
Article of the Week
The Difference between Strategy and Innovation (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea: Strategy and innovation are quite distinct, requiring vastly different people, skill sets and processes. The conundrum is that every business needs both. This articles presents a brief guide about what each needs to succeed, where to deploy them, who should drive them, and what to expect.
Article of the Week
Resource Fluidity
The Difference between Strategy and Innovation
Big Idea: Strategy and innovation are quite distinct, requiring vastly different people, skill sets and processes. The conundrum is that every business needs both. This articles presents a brief guide about what each needs to succeed, where to deploy them, who should drive them, and what to expect.
Innovation Excellence
June 29, 2012
Editor’s Choice Articles
The Importance of Studying the Obvious (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: How can we better appreciate the limits of our intuition, and hence the need to support the scientific investigation of human affairs? One interesting possibility is raised by the arrival of “big data” where the potential for all these data to yield insight into human behavior is tantalizing. Unfortunately the insights are often at odds with our intuition. Clearly a more rigorous, scientific approach is needed.
Valuing Radical Innovation (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea: Early stage opportunities that disrupt markets or create new ones are mired in uncertainty. They are unlikely to use the standard business model for that category where the full potential of the product is difficult to estimate. Given these dynamics, really radical innovation should not be quantified in the same way as existing incremental opportunities.
2 Tools to Help You Make Smarter, Faster Decisions on the Fly (Fast Company)
Big Idea: Making a good decision depends on getting the right information, processing it, and then making the best choice you can. The author of this article has created a proof-of-concept tool that helps organizations improve decision-making by focusing on the problem, options, and priorities.
Evade an Innovation Blackout (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Innovation can be stifled by normal business processes. Knowledge workers are essential to innovation, and when nudged off-task their output wanes. Companies must structure work so that peripheral parts of processes can be taken up by hyperspecialists, who provide distinct skills that help knowledge workers stay on track.