Every so often, doubtless in a doomed bid to make the whole process of growth and innovation more predictable, some bright spark comes up with the idea of trying to apply six-sigma quality controls to… Read more »
Growth Options / Real Options
This disruption thing is harder than it looks
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, writer Kimberly Chou reviewed the fates of several contenders to be disruptive technologies in the industries in which they were introduced. . Among these are the flip videorecorder,… Read more »
Real Options, the Living Dead, and how to play the possibility of failure in the financial markets
I’m a big fan of thinking of bets in highly uncertain environments in terms of options. With growth options, I usually advise thinking of new opportunities as options – in which you place a small… Read more »
Yikes! Putting your core business in discovery mode: BlockBuster and Circuit City
The unsolicited attempt by video rental chain Blockbuster to take over electronics retailer Circuit City looks like a pretty desperate move. In short, a company that prospered with the rise of the whole rent-it-out couch… Read more »
Discovery Driven Strategy: Options investments enable the right kind of failures (Amex Express Pay)
American Express has just announced that it is discontinuing the “Express Pay” offering that allows contact-less payments by consumers, along the lines of the popular Speedpass payment systems that were successfully implemented by gas stations… Read more »
Google practices our idea!
In our first book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, we suggested that companies achieve focus by allocating time to projects across different levels of uncertainty. In reading the Business 2.0 of December, 2005, we discovered that one… Read more »
iPhone for positioning?
Is Steve Jobs playing the options game? In our book ‘The Entrepreneurial Mindset’ we argued that uncertain ventures could be treated as the real asset equivalent of financial options, building on a lot of great… Read more »