Category: innovation

entrepreneurship, innovation, Management, strategy

A trade-off between conformity and differentiation is the key to successful innovations

What determines the success of an innovation is rarely its intrinsic quality, its technical or economic performance. The graveyards are full of “brilliant” innovations that were not successful. The success of an innovation rather depends on its capacity to conform to the existing institutional framework in order to be accepted. But how do you stay different if you conform? This difficult trade-off determines the success or failure of the innovation. A historical example is that of Thomas Edison in his promotion of electric lighting over gas.

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innovation, Management, strategy, transformation

How declining organizations create an imaginary double

Organizations in decline tend to create an imaginary double in which they lock themselves. This double is themselves, but in an idealized version. It is a mask that they create to hide and to insulate themselves from a reality that they refuse, letting the world go without them, even against them. The dissolution of this double, i.e. the acceptance of reality, however unpleasant it may be, is a prerequisite for any recovery. A good illustration of this is provided by the Apple turnaround in 1997.

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Economy and society, innovation

Why rich peoples’ whims are useful for innovation

What do rich people do when they are bored? They embark on an innovation project. Conquer Mars, cross the Atlantic, extend human life, invent fundamental artificial intelligence, create a robot, etc. As an expression of their promoters’ ego, these projects are often considered useless and qualified as whims, i.e. a capricious and unreasonable envy. But is it so sure? What if (some of) the whims of today were the useful innovations of tomorrow? What if we should be careful not to pass moral judgment on both what is being done (useless!) and on those who are doing it (the rich and their whims)?

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innovation

Is Google Victim of the Innovator’s Dilemma with ChatGPT?

ChatGPT, an “intelligent” chatbot, represents a major breakthrough. One would have expected that Google, the leader in search engines for the last twenty years, which has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence, would have been at the origin of it, but it is not the case. Is Google the new victim of the innovator’s dilemma, a syndrome often observed when a leader is overtaken by a new entrant?

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innovation

Assessing the Potential of ChatGPT: Lessons from the History of Innovation

[Version in French here]

Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past few weeks, you couldn’t escape news about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool that answers all your questions: summarizing an article, informing you about the economic crisis, writing a poem, etc. As with any new technology, it is presented as revolutionary by some and futile, useless, or even dangerous by others. While it will take time for the dust to settle, we can nevertheless avoid some of the pitfalls, and above all, the clear-cut positions, by relying on the history of innovation, which offers at least seven lessons for a more nuanced approach to the debate.

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entrepreneurship, innovation, Management, uncertainty

Is Meta the new Kodak? Eight history lessons on the necessity and risks of big innovation bets

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is doing badly. The announcement of its poor results was very badly received by the stock market. The company lost 25% of its value in one day. The weakness of Facebook and the doubts about the relevance of the colossal investment made in the metaverse, a system creating a virtual world, question the strategy of the company. The weakness of the legacy activity, and the difficulty to launch a new activity, the situation of Meta is not unlike that of Kodak twenty years ago. A look at the history of the major bets made by companies to launch or renew themselves is useful to better understand the issues facing Meta and avoid hasty judgments.

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entrepreneurship, innovation, Management

Innovation: why the distinction between exploration and exploitation is problematic

In the field of innovation, the distinction between exploration and exploitation is universal. It is clear, it seems obvious, and it has become gospel in the world of innovation. Yet it is counter-productive, as it rests on questionable assumptions. It illustrates how the way we formulate a problem, i.e. our mental model, determines our ability to solve it. The wrong mental model locks us in, while the right one opens up possibilities. It’s time to let go the exploration/exploitation distinction.

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