Innovation Management:

Venture Strategies

Radical Innovation

The Key Driver of Growth, Profitability, and Competitive Advantage

 Lessons from Silicon Valley Firms  

Deciding If Your Innovation Portfolio Has Enough Stretch

Adapted from Relentless Growth, Christopher Meyer

1. Balance between revolutionary and evolutionary initiatives. First, Silicon Valley companies assess the overall balance between revolutionary and evolutionary projects. The ultimate arbitrator of portfolio stretch if the innovation leaders’ judgment, experience, intuition, and luck... More

The Art of Innovation: 9 Truths

By: Guy Kawasaki

1. Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing. True innovation happens when a company jumps to the next curve – or better still, invents the next curve, so set your goals high... More

What is Radical Innovation?

Long-term corporate success linked to the ability to innovate. Although corporate investment in improvements to existing products and processes does bring growth, it is new game changing breakthroughs that will launch company into new markets, enable rapid growth, and create high return on investment.

Radical innovation, concerned with exploration of new technology, is fundamentally different from incremental innovation that is concerned with exploitation of existing technology. "Radical innovation is a product, process, or service with either unprecedented performance features or familiar features that offer potential for significant improvements in performance and cost."¹ It creates such a dramatic change in processes, products, or services that they transform existing markets or industries, or create new ones.

Inspirational Business Plan: Successful Innovation

Market Analysis: "My experience has been that creating a compelling new technology is so much harder than you think it will be that you're almost dead when you get to the other shore." – Steve Jobs... More

Traditional Management Approaches Do Not Fit

High levels of uncertainties – technical, market, organizational, and resources – create extraordinary challenges for project management. "The problem of multiple dimensions of uncertainty is complicated by the fact that the uncertainties interact with one another."¹

New competencies are required to address the challenge of radical innovation project management. These challenges include:

• Motivating radical idea generation and capturing promising ideas in the "fuzzy front end"

• Managing sporadic, nonlinear, stochastic, and context-dependent radical innovation projects

• Engaging individual initiative – upper managers, project team, and key individuals

• Learning about and forecasting markets for radical innovation

• Reducing uncertainty in the business model

• Bridging resource and competency gap

Radical Innovation vs. Incremental Innovation

There is practical value in understanding the patterns in and the differences between evolutionary incremental innovation projects and revolutionary radical innovation projects. This understanding can help you apply right management practices to different types of innovation projects and make the course of radical innovation shorter, less sporadic, less expensive, and less uncertain.

High level of uncertainty is a hallmark a radical innovation projects, especially at early stages. The criteria used to evaluate a radical idea and concept should differ from those applied to evaluating incremental innovations. Viewing radical ideas – associated with high uncertainties – from the perspective of the mainstream business and applying traditional evaluation methods and criteria to them is inappropriate and counterproductive. Either these methods give a false sense of security, or they lead to premature rejection of good ideas... More

Radical Innovation by Cross-Functional Individuals

"Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony!".¹

While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects. Individuals who are likely to excel in a radical innovation project, besides having superior technical capabilities, should be goal-oriented, broadly educated, creative, extremely bright, not afraid to be different, integrative, flexible, passionate, entrepreneurial, aggressive, eager to learn business, able to take risks, and inquisitive.¹

 Joke  "Three Legged Chicken"

Blue Ocean Strategy: 6 Principles

Blue Ocean Strategy is about revolutionary value innovation.

The six principles drive the successful formulation and execution of Blue Ocean Strategy. These principles attenuate the six risks... More