This week marks the release of Clayton Christensen’s highly-anticipated book, How Will You Measure Your Life (with co-authors James Allworth and Karen Dillon). The book expands on Christensen’s McKinsey-award-winning HBR article, drawing life lessons from the models that form the basis of his business-oriented writing.

I first heard the germs of those ideas in late 2000. At the time I was one of Christensen’s students at HBS. Like all professors, Christensen used his final class lecture to share broader observations and reflections. The speech resonated with me, so while serving as his lead researcher in 2001 and 2002, I returned to his classroom to hear it again.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love my three young children immensely. So it’s hard for me to be fully rational about them. Of course they are the smartest, the best looking, and the most athletic. I’m not alone — all parents are irrational. We lose sleep worrying about things we can’t control and take pride in ridiculously small achievements we had nothing to do with.

A similar type of irrationality affects innovators. Talk to an entrepreneur or a scientist about the idea they are working on — it’s just like talking to a parent of young children. They feel unduly proud when their team does something without needing their help. They endlessly worry about things that are well beyond their control.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the challenges facing market leaders is that transformational trends are only obvious when it’s too late. Typically, transformation starts in seemingly disconnected industries, or as innocent offerings targeting completely different customer segments. To spot these trends early, companies need to heed the advice of Wharton Professor George Day and long-time thought leader (and current Innosight Board member) Richard Foster by heading to the periphery.

First, start with peripheral customers. MIT Professor Eric von Hippel has long advocated spending time with what he calls lead users. Because of their unique needs, these cutting-edge users often come up with novel solutions to problems and can provide you with powerful innovation insights. Look, too, at young customers, who are usually the first to snatch up new technologies because they don’t have to unlearn ingrained behaviors. Also, consider customers facing extreme constraints. For example, a few years ago, we helped a company looking at hydration opportunities to investigate the workarounds created by soldiers in Iraq.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is there a corporate leader who doesn’t extol the virtues of innovation these days? Yet if innovation is so important, why do so many companies have so much trouble with it?

The reflexive response is that it is a human capital problem — that is, that most people just don’t have what it takes to successfully innovate. I reject that view. Academic research in fact shows that almost anyone can become a competent innovator (with sufficient practice). I’ve seen countless examples of ordinary individuals displaying the creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance of the world’s great innovators.

Read the rest of this entry »

A movement originating from the United States’ West Coast has sought to transform the creation of new businesses from an art to a science. The intellectual leader of the movement is Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who now teaches at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. One of Blank’s disciples, Eric Ries, turned his wildly popular Startup Lessons Learned blog into The Lean Startup, one of 2011’s best business books.

I’m a huge fan of this work and suggest that all innovators study the movement closely. One area that deserves particular attention is the notion of the minimal viable product (MVP). The concept is pretty simple. Because it’s next to impossible to be sure that your idea is good until you bring it into the marketplace, don’t waste time trying to fine-tune a product that is destined to be wrong. Instead, put something “good enough” in the marketplace. Let real customers use the product and learn from their feedback (Henry Mintzberg dubbed this process “emergent strategy” in an influential 1985 article [PDF]).

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a topic that perhaps would only appear on the pages of The Economist: an effort to establish North America’s first elephant sperm bank. As the article notes, a single elephant named Jackson has “sired many of the calves born in the United States in the past decade, and scientists say new bloodlines are needed to avoid future inbreeding among his many progeny.”

Inbreeding presents real problems. Recessive genes carrying debilitating diseases are more likely to pair. Problems perpetuate from generation to generation. Adaptation slows. “Project Frozen Dumbo” aims to collect genetic material from wild elephants in South Africa to stop the cycle. Generally, cross-breeding drives generally increase a species’ long-term odds of survival by introducing new combinations into the gene pool.

Read the rest of this entry »

A workshop attendee asked me this seemingly simple question: “So, what else should I read to learn more about innovation?”

It’s a hard question to answer because there is so much high-quality material out there. And specific recommendations depend on the specific topic about which you are most curious. But in thinking it through, I did eventually end up with a highly personal list I call “The Masters of Innovation” (which appears in my latest book). My intent was to provide a simple entry point to innovation literature by describing people I’ve found consistently insightful, distilling their key lesson to a single sentence, and pointing to where to go to learn more. To see my selections, click here.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently participated in a spirited panel discussion with Bruce Brown, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Technology Officer, and Erich Joachimsthaler, Vivaldi Partners’ managing director and CEO. The topic — part of a series on innovation sponsored by Singapore’s Economic Development Board and coordinated by Harvard Business Review — was “What’s the Right Entry Point for Emerging Markets: Target Customers at the Bottom or the Middle of the Pyramid?”

I kicked off the discussion by arguing that many companies ought to start in the middle. After all, the World Bank estimates that the number of middle class consumers in emerging markets will jump from 420 million today to more than 1.2 billion by 2030. In Asia alone, spending in that market tier will surge during that time period from $5 trillion to $30 trillion.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I had coffee with a friend who was complaining about her company’s ability to innovate.

“That iteration-itis post you wrote really hit home,” she said. “That’s just what my life is like. But you know, my leadership team is smart. And they’ve been hugely successful. So why are they doing things that are just so obviously wrong?”

Read the rest of this entry »

The most successful innovators are consistently portrayed as possessing a passion that borders on dogmatism. They work tirelessly to bend reality to achieve their vision, with Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” serving as the prototypical example.

There’s no doubt that passion is a critical component of innovation. After all, innovation is awfully hard work, with plenty of false starts. Rosabeth Moss Kanter teaches that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Mike Tyson puts it another way: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” Passion is necessary to keep pushing when the punch inevitably lands.

Read the rest of this entry »