innovation

Five mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project: 3- Trying to be the first

This article is the third part of a series of fives articles on mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project, extracted from my new book “A Manager’s Guide to Disruptive Innovation”.

The disruption theory can shed new light on the first mover advantage. The first mover advantage theory states that the first entrant in a new market has the advantage of being able to take leadership of the market and effectively resisting the entry of subsequent competitors. This theory forms the conceptual basis of a popular approach known as “blue ocean”.

By advancing the premise that the main factor of competitiveness is the order of arrival on the market, this theory recommends to companies to go as quickly as possible to be the first. However this theory suffers from a major flaw: it is rarely supported by the facts. Many leading players in their field were late entrants, to name just a few: Procter & Gamble with its disposable diapers, Gillette with its disposable razors, Google with its search engines, and Apple with its iPhone.

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innovation

Five mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project: 2-Imitating entrepreneurs in failing fast

This article is the second part of a series of fives articles on mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project, extracted from my new book “A Manager’s Guide to Disruptive Innovation”.

Because the innovation process is so complex and uncertain, entrepreneurs continually ponder over the ideal approach to an innovation project. Today, some recommend an approach called “fail fast, fail early”. In essence, the idea is that since entrepreneurs cannot really know where they are going, then they should just try something quickly to see if it works, and if it does not work, give up and try something else. This idea is appealing: it calls for open-mindedness and flatters the entrepreneur by highlighting his or her ability to make difficult decisions. However, for a start-up entrepreneur as well as for an existing business, this attitude is dangerous because it is built on an implicit but erroneous premise concerning the innovation process.

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innovation

Five mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project: 1-Trying to go too fast

This article is the first part of a series of fives articles on mistakes to avoid when managing a disruptive project, extracted from my new book ‘”A Manager’s Guide to Disruptive Innovation”.

One of the cardinal errors with disruptive innovation is to seek to scale up too quickly. In most cases, this condemns the project to fail.

There are two reasons why a company pushes for rapid growth: the first is that large companies need big markets to grow, and the second is that there is an underlying belief that the development of a disruptive innovation project is linear.

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innovation

How Top Management Kills Disruptive Innovation: Death by a Thousand Cuts

We often think that innovation is not successful within an organization because top management puts an end to the project or denies the project the means necessary for its development. This happens, but this is rarely the case. Very often, innovation, especially disruptive innovation, dies when the project is discovered by top management, and the latter, for the price of its support, requires that the project fit within the current organization, thereby removing its disruptive aspects.

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innovation

Educating for the Digital Transformation: Four Common Mistakes

Digital is everywhere. As Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, a Web pioneer and now star investor in the Silicon Valley, wrote: “Software is eating the world.” There is no industry today that is not impacted by the digital revolution. How to prepare our executives, current and future, for this revolution? The question is not new but it seems that many mistakes are made in the approaches, including by those who design training programs on the issue. Let’s review four of these mistakes.
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Theory

Power to the user: how innovation puts technology in the hands of the users

One of the characteristics of innovation is to simplify and make more accessible technologies that previously required experts to handle them. Pregnancy tests illustrate this phenomenon: while in the 60s it was necessary to visit a doctor to perform such a test, it can now be performed by buying a $5 kit in a pharmacy. The change for a given technology is therefore translated by two factors: a reduction in costs and simplification. In other words, because the technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, experts are less and less needed for a given problem to solve. Indeed, those pregnancy tests are more and more bought online, thus removing the need for the pharmacist. In 50 years, solving this problem have moved from the doctor to the pharmacist, then from the pharmacist to the user.

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