Lead and Disrupt

You think startups are hard? Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman coined the term an “Ambidextrous Organization” to describe how some companies get this simultaneous execution and innovation […]

Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to in the last couple years, but this one just made my head explode. The award was for an entrepreneur who worked against all odds to buck the system to […]

You Don’t Need Permission

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices to hospitals in the UK National Health Service.  His boss had identified the U.S. as their next market and […]

Your Product is Not Their Problem

There are no facts inside your building, so get the heck outside I just had a call with Lorenz, a former business school student who started a job at a biotech startup making bacteria to take CO2 out of the air. His job was to find new commercial markets for this bacteria at scale.  And […]

A Path to the Minimum Viable Product

I first met Shawn Carolan and his wife Jennifer at the turn of the century at 11,000 feet. I was hiking with my kids between the Yosemite High Sierra camps. Having just retired from a career as an entrepreneur I had started thinking about why startups were different from large companies. The ideas were bouncing around […]

These Five Principles Will Accelerate Innovation

As Director of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force Pete Newell delivered innovation at speed and scale in the Department of Defense. Pete is now CEO of BMNT, a company that delivers innovation solutions and processes for governments. Here are Pete’s 5 principles that will accelerate innovation. To help a large Defense organization wrestle with how to increase […]

Reminder

A Quick Course on Lean

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. One of the key lessons from our Educators Conference is that when teaching online complex information needs to be delivered to students in small, easily processed parts. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series […]

Rising out of the Crisis: Where to Find New Markets and Customers

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Accounts receivables are stretching way out. Revenue models and forecasts are no longer […]

What Can A Startup Do in 5 days? Watch this

With a terrific crew of instructors, TA’s, and mentors, we successfully concluded Session 1 of our Hacking 4 Recovery summer series – with 20 teams sharing their final presentations last night. Slides for these presentations are in this folder, and we will be editing and sharing videos of each presentation shortly.   Alivia – Telemedicine […]