Tag: disruptive innovation

innovation, strategy

Disruptive innovation: What are the conditions for real impact?

Almost thirty years after the pioneering work of Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation remains a major challenge for organizations. How do you avoid missing the breakthrough? Or, on the contrary, how do you capitalize on them? At the heart of these questions is the question of impact and scale, because while everyone is experimenting with breakthroughs here and there, very few are able to go beyond them. To avoid the pitfalls, we must first understand their nature.

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entrepreneurship, innovation, Management, strategy

How innovators negotiate entrenched mental models. Lessons from Thomas Edison

Innovation, the driving force behind progress, often faces a formidable adversary: entrenched mental models. These cognitive frameworks shape our understanding of the world and can become barriers to the acceptance of breakthrough ideas. Managing the dynamic between innovation and prevailing mental models is the innovator’s challenge. Thomas Edison’s promotion of electric lighting over gas provides an example of how this challenge was successfully met.

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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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