Innovation

He or she can create an innovative environment using these five principles.

These five questions will help give your numbers meaning.

Crucial (and cost-free) ways policymakers can support scale-up entrepreneurs.

A recent edition of Fortune describes innovations in computer gaming that are likely to be as disruptive to incumbent players like Electronic Arts and Activision as the move toward cloud computing is to providers of shrink-wrapped software. While the incumbents have been engaged in the innovation equivalent of an arms race – ever more powerful […]

One-size-fits-all won't work.

Editor’s note: This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. Close to quarter of a billion children go to school in India. Many leave without mastering concepts, gaining confidence or communicative skill. Oftentimes, our 6 million practicing teachers are […]

Listening to good entrepreneurs make their pitch is great fun. How well, or poorly, they align their passion and persuasiveness to the product details reveals a lot. Are they pushing an idea or telling a story? Is it all about their own charisma or is the innovative idea the real hero? Are we having a […]

Late next week, you’re going to notice some changes around here. We’re about to unveil a new design and structure for Harvard Business Publishing’s Web properties. You’re probably familiar with two of our Web sites- one (HBR.org) focused primarily on content from the print Harvard Business Review, and the second (HarvardBusiness.org) showcasing mostly Web-native content […]

People like the product, but the process falls short.

Disclosure: The author is a shareholder in AOL. It’s been funny watching the financial press and the tech community eviscerate AOL’s Patch.com since last week’s disappointing earnings call. The irony is that Patch is AOL’s last, best chance to build a growth engine. Investors shouldn’t be calling for AOL to back off the business. They […]

They’re building on their existing skills in analytics.

Three years ago, when a cave-in at the San Jose mine in Chile trapped 33 men under 700,000 metric tons of rock, experts estimated the probability of getting...

Consensus is often the enemy of innovation.

How science fiction and other unconventional tools can fire the imagination and lead to breakthrough growth.

In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called "the lean start-up," has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture's...

The ideas industry needs to stop monkeying around.

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of potentially valuable innovations flop because the companies sponsoring them were using the fundamentally wrong logic in managing them. For instance, as Clayton Christensen recently described in the Harvard Business Review, they insist on valuing projects in terms of Net Present Value. A different approach, we’ve argued, is […]

We're going to have plenty of media and journalism in coming years and decades. I take this for granted. But will we have enough information and journalism...

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors,...

And it's realizing that now.