Our world is rife with many examples of unintended consequences. Is it really possible that most people don’t think about the far-reaching effects of their actions and only focus on the short-term benefits? Not so surprising when you realize that very few individuals think or plan further than a few weeks or months out. When…
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Many startup founders (or corporate innovators) have an issue with the concept of an MVP. The definition of a Minimum Viable Product varies greatly – but in the purest sense, it should be “the least you can do” For example, I co-founded a startup in 2009 with two ex-Yahoo colleagues. We’d started as a consulting shop…
The post how to discover the secrets of great new products: do the least you can do, fake it before you make it, and don’t be afraid of embarrassment appeared first on hellofuture.
One of the most challenging things to convince people is the essential need to “look farther out.” Most people are so focused on the very near term – looking no more than a year or a quarter out, that they never lift their gaze into the future. They feel that strategic foresight is: Nice to…
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Looking to make your business more innovative? Stop celebrating promotions. The corporate world is an interesting place. For the longest time, it was mired in a hierarchical structure, with workers reporting to managers, reporting to directors, reporting to vice-presidents reporting to presidents (or the C-Suite). Is it still relevant, or a vestige of a previous…
The post Party For Results, Not Rank appeared first on hellofuture.
Have you ever been in those meetings where discussion keeps going around and around, and you can sense that you are going nowhere and that unless someone intervenes, this entire meeting will be for nothing? The key is to erect a straw man – and let people wack the hell out of it. For some…
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What are humans really like? I think we all, deep down, know the answer to that question. Yet, we still hold out hope that humans can change their nature. We feel that since we seem to be intelligent and capable of change — that we have these big brains which allow us to think and feel — and to supposedly…
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In the book, Loonshots, the author describes the origin of some of the most spectacularly successful institutions of our time as being generated by specific kinds of individuals in particular types of environments. In other words, the magic formula is people + environment = disruptive innovation. An environment that creates amazingly disruptive products is one…
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In the book, Loonshots, the author describes the origin of some of the most spectacularly successful institutions of our time as being generated by specific kinds of individuals in particular types of environments. In other words, the magic formula is people + environment = disruptive innovation. An environment that creates amazingly disruptive products is one…
The post How To Incentivize Disruptive Innovation appeared first on hellofuture.
A common refrain that I hear from individuals at some of the companies that we’ve worked with in the past (and some prospects who ultimately decide not to work with us) is that we are experts at generating ideas, but most of those ideas simply do not have a business model – which is, of course, a fancy way of saying “we can’t figure out how to make any money with this idea”.
Prior to the widespread adoption of the web and the internet, I used to run something called a Bulletin Board System (BBS), where we would use phone lines to communicate on message boards. Every so often, our message boards would call each other and exchange messages, thus allowing us to communicate (this was in a time when long distance calls actually cost money, so the updates sometimes only happened once a day).