Exponential
The Strategy X Blog
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The Power of an Audacious Vision
Staff • 17 January 2020
In our work with business leaders around the world, we spend a lot of time talking about the organizational philosophies and cultures required to guide and nurture innovation in the business. One of the key questions we are often asked is, “how can we drive ownership and engagement within and across our organization for the new things we're trying to do?” And the answer that…
Market Disruption vs. Business Disruption: The Inertial Disruption Factor
Staff • 20 December 2019
According to Newton's Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As with physics, so with business innovation. Whenever an innovation impacts a market, it also impacts the organization delivering the innovation. It is as though when the organization pushes on the market, the market pushes back. Nudge the market just a little…
Five Reasons Organizations Fail at Customer Experience Delivery
Staff • 15 November 2019
In our discussions with business leaders around the world, we continue to be impressed with the growing recognition of Customer Experience as an engine of sustainable growth. Well–conceived, well–designed, and well–delivered customer experiences are a core foundation for achieving the sort of market leadership that has become the hallmark of businesses like…
Staff • 18 October 2019
Back in 1991, Don Reinertsen and Preston Smith introduced the world to the concept of the ‘Fuzzy Front End’ of product development. The following year, Peter Koen offered a bit more structure and definition around this concept when he renamed it the ‘Front End of Innovation’, or FEI — a name that has stuck. Koen envisioned the ‘Front End’ as involving a series of…
Your Innovation Pipeline Is What You Feed It
Staff • 20 September 2019
There was a time once, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, when business organizations could develop a technology, make a product out of it, and then go sell it. It didn't matter so much what their customers thought of it — as customers just didn't have very many choices to choose from at the time. Thus, so long as it mostly met the need at hand, it was…
Lean is Dead. Long Live Lean!
Staff • 16 August 2019
Over thirty years ago, James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos introduced the world to a modern understanding of the concept of Lean Production. This was the result of a 5–year study of the automotive industry that culminated in the book The Machine That Changed the World, which in particular celebrated the Toyota Production System. With its foundational…
The Poets, The Nerds, and The Suits
Staff • 19 July 2019
In the ancient world, there were three roles of influence that tended to engage one another… the Prophets, the Priests, and the Kings. These three danced a tenuous dance together… at times at great odds with each other, often over accountability issues, and at other times in aid of one another. One might say it was a ‘love/hate relationship’… one that at times ended with the…
The Innovation Generation Has Arrived
Staff • 21 June 2019
Once upon a time, in the heyday of the Industrial Era, a young marketing, design, or engineering student would graduate from college and go to work for a large corporation, slowly melding into the steady, rhythmic din of bureaucratically-managed, organizationally-structured execution work in product development. And they were just peachy keen happy with that…
The Seven Deadly Sins of Innovation
Staff • 17 May 2019
In our years of leading and studying innovation, we've come to recognize seven deadly sins that threaten to derail innovation inside all businesses. If we as business organizations are to therefore succeed at innovation, we must constantly navigate the perils of these sins and pursue a life of ‘righteous innovation’. The first sin is not making love to our markets…
Who Are the World's Most Innovative Businesses?
Staff • 19 April 2019
Ask most people to tick off their list of who they believe are ‘the world's most innovative businesses’, and you're likely to get something along these lines: Apple, Google, Amazon, Nike, GE, and so on. All of these are certainly high verve businesses with incredibly well known brands. But at the end of the day, these are subjective perceptions based purely on top–of–mind…
The Innovation Mosaic: Building Bridges Between the Perspectives on Innovation
Staff • 15 March 2019
We've been students of innovation for more years now than we care to count. One of the things that has always made innovation so enjoyable to us is the fact that every business discipline seems to believe that they ‘own’ and/or ‘invented’ innovation — a premise from which they have devised their own particular flavor of innovation — one that in each case mirrors their…
On Innovation as a Spiritual Journey
Staff • 15 February 2019
Normally, we stick to writing about business innovation, and strictly in the context of business. But today we take a moment to depart off course and invite you into a deeper and fundamentally more human question about innovation… a question that transcends business organizations and other institutions… the question of “Why?”. Indeed, have you ever wondered why…