Prototypes are a great way to get customer feedback about elements of your proposed innovation before you have to invest a ton of resources in them. But there is a bit of science to how… Read more »
Business Start Ups / Entrepreneurship
How a Growth Gap can Sneak Up On You
This article was co-developed with Alex van Putten, Partner at Cameron and Associates, and draws from our 2017 article “How to Set More Realistic Growth Targets.” It’s always easy to project rosy growth goals that… Read more »
Digital transformation, the discovery-driven way
Talking about digital transformation has a way of freaking people out. They then do the exact wrong thing, which is to throw money and effort at anyone who can promise that – Poof! – digital… Read more »
How Not to Blow Your First Marketing Campaign: 3 Factors
Most new product launches fail. One big, and unnecessary reason is focusing too much on the product or service offering and not focusing enough on how the thing will be brought to market. New! New!… Read more »
Discovering Perfectly Predictable Mistakes – Before You Make Them
There are no failures in Thoughtland – that mystical place where great ideas for new products and services are first born. But if you want to travel to the real world, you’ll need a different… Read more »
The Discipline that Turns Vision into Reality
In the heady days of coming up with what you think is a breakthrough idea, it’s easy to get carried away by assumptions. Forcing yourself to create a deliverables specification can create powerful discipline. Entrepreneurs… Read more »
A no-nonsense guide to measuring innovation mastery
What is it like to work in an organization that has attained high levels of innovation mastery? It’s growth-oriented, future-focused and unrelentingly positive. And by taking small steps, the place you work can be more… Read more »
Unanticipated Consequences of a Potential Baby Bust
Although the early warning signs that an inflection point is on the way are often detectable years, even decades, in advance, trying to time most inflection points is incredibly frustrating. Not so with demographics. In… Read more »
Newsletter Anniversary Edition – Not A Moment Too Soon!
Seeing Around Corners: Anniversary Edition – Not a Moment too Soon! Hard as it is to believe it, Seeing Around Corners celebrated its first anniversary on September 3rd and even I could not have predicted… Read more »
Venture Capital 2.0: This Time, It’s Different?
Venture capitalists are partying as if it’s 1999—and we know how that went. Entrepreneurship 101 says startups should conserve cash, keep costs flexible, and operate with parsimony. Way too many founders in the 90’s laughed… Read more »
Finding your arena – a new book and new toolkit
I was delighted to read Steve Blank’s great post featuring the work of my friend and colleague Marc Gruber. Marc and I have been colleagues since my days in the entrepreneurship program at Wharton and… Read more »
There is such a thing as a repeatable startup methodology
Among the many myths that corporate types have about startups (whether standalone or of the corporate variety) is that there is some kind of alchemy involved. Sort of “Steve Jobs arrives on a clamshell and… Read more »