Win Through Innovation

In ten years, everything could be very different… while on the surface being as recognizable as possible.

Risk management is important, but once trust has been established in an organization, you’ll radically improve your chances of success by giving your people permission to pursue their ideas. The Kenyan company Ushahidi learned this lesson along the way: a data-mapping business with a clear vision for its future, Ushahidi decided to take a chance on one lead engineer’s radically different approach. The CEO realized he had a choice to make: Do I put my foot down and retain sole authority to disr...

We most certainly live in interesting times. While non-experts are obviously wowed by the emergence of 3D printing, driverless cars, and other mind-boggling innovations, tech insiders are also universally aware that we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, one that has only begun to gather momentum. The coming decades will continue to unleash technological marvels that radically change the way we live and do business. Why is this happening now, after a few decades since the seventies of uninspi...

“Sometimes you get the benefits of network effects by accident, but well-managed companies get them by design.” To underscore this core fact, Michael Schrage points to the financial services industry. Its strongest competition right now is coming from “robo advisors” that are taking advantage of network effects that many financial services companies have been ignoring.

These days, the rate of disruptive change across industries due to exponential technologies is astonishing and apparently limitless. In this video, engineer and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa takes us on a whirlwind tour of the changes in progress and soon to come that will leave many industry leaders in the dust.

Around 1990, the world dissolved into bits. Suddenly it became apparent that almost anything could be represented in digital form. First to go were the flat media: video, text, music. With the advent of 3D printing, the blueprints of physical objects could be transmitted through space, too, and those objects recreated identically all over the world. To contradict Marshall Mcluhan, the medium was no longer the message. The message was conveyed in bits that could be converted into almost any mediu...

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation that supports it are unprecedented examples of demonetization through crowdsourcing. Impossible in theory, Wikipedia in practice has become — according to a study in Nature — as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It owes its success to transparency, openness, and volunteer editors worldwide who eagerly correct errors as quickly as they arise, a valuable lesson in the benefits of open digital information-sharing with users. In the process, they’ve s...

In the digital economy, innovation can come from anywhere. The barriers to entry and costs of doing business are so low that small companies can undermine Fortune 500 giants overnight, and businesses like Google and Amazon can expand competitively into entirely new sectors, like transportation and cloud-based computing. McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika argues that several factors are behind this deceptive, distributed growth:

One of the most misunderstood terms in the business world is disruptive technology. Too many companies – and the marketers in charge of bringing these companies’ innovations to market – assume that “disruptive” connotes a highly-sophisticated, high-end product with cutting-edge technology that will appeal to early adopters.As Harvard’s Clayton Christensen points out, disruptive technologies were exactly those that did not appeal to entrenched market leaders because they tended to under-per...

Retail is changing fast, and supply chains need to adapt to the new reality. The internet gives consumers instant access to information about trends, pricing, and corporate practices. Digital retailers like Amazon raise customer expectations around speed of delivery and personalization. To meet these new demands, supply chains need to become faster, more flexible, more transparent, and more sustainable. New products need to be brought market almost as quickly as consumers can conceive of them.

Supply chains have adapted to a digitized world driven by an exponential increase in computing power, but what are the other trends affecting these chains? Since the late 1970s, a growing middle class in Asia has changed the way supply chains have optimized to include a globalization of consumption as well as a globalization of production. Now that goods are being consumed in the East as well as produced there, supply chains must adapt. Learn about these demographic and economic shifts, the chan...

John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull and other books, says we have put a giant target sign on the backs of American workers. We have designed jobs in the U.S. that tend to be “tightly scripted” and “highly standardized” ones that leave no room for “individual initiative or creativity.” In short, these are the types of jobs at which machines can perform much better than human beings.It’s time to reinvent the formula for how work is conducted, Hagel says. In our rapidly changing economy,...

The pace of business has accelerated – products go from concept to release faster than ever, and competitors react more nimbly to changes in consumer demand, preferences, and behavior. The pressure to innovate and commercialize as quickly as possible has never been stronger. But how does the sense of urgency driving production ultimately impact product quality?Bill Nye “the Science Guy” was trained as a mechanical engineer before becoming the science popularizer we know and love today. In thi...

Divergent thinking often results in a stronger final design because it gives everyone involved the breathing room to experiment before they’re corralled into a particular vision. It also communicates that feedback and experimental ideas are welcome from all quarters, rather than the sole property of the design team. This often sparks “outsider innovation” from team members who can see the forest for the trees because they’re not so immersed in the design process. ‘

As Dr. Michio Kaku explains in this lesson, Soviet Astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev ranked the civilizations of the future according to how much energy they would derive from the sun.

Our values as a society will determine which psychopharmaceuticals and which genetic enhancement technologies we choose to develop and how these innovations will be used.That’s what concerns Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, Senior Bioethicist at NASA and a pioneer in the field of neuroethics. Peering into his children’s and grandchildren’s future, he sees an America that rewards competitiveness and productivity over relationship-building, and suspects that future generations will face intense pressure to...

Elon Musk became an innovator at a very early age. Inspired to be an inventor by the example of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, Musk considered three areas he wanted to get into that were particularly important. “One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space,” he said. Subsequently, Musk went on to found or co-found the companies PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors.These three companies produced, respectively, an Internet payment system (PayPal), the first viable electric car (Tesl...