A few years ago, I started attending the Global Peter Drucker Forum, which has become a real who’s who of management conferences. It takes place each November in Vienna and features luminaries and thought leaders… Read more »
Business Start Ups / Entrepreneurship
What a startup can learn about customer needs from a medieval practice
In a recent article over at Fortune, I explore what Transferwise, a fast-growing new startup has rediscovered: an enduring customer need that is currently featuring in the migrant crisis, Hawala. The practice of Hawala originated centuries… Read more »
Now in development: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship On-Line
What if you could take teams of people or individual contributors with an innovation mandate and have them go through a state of the art, hands-on and very applied journey through the essence of innovation… Read more »
Corporate entrepreneurship’s latest incarnation-the virtual startup
In this insightful blog post, Steve Sokol runs through the pluses and minuses of being part of a startup within a large corporation, what he calls a “virtual startup.” The pluses are many – a… Read more »
Workers of the World…upsides and downsides of the on-demand workforce
In an article that appeared the other day on CNBC, reporter Cadie Thompson mulls over the effects of all these on-demand companies that make their money by connecting people with tasks to be done or… Read more »
Why the failure of Google Glass Might be a Boon to Google
It’s official. The nerdy glasses with augmented reality and all kinds of image capturing technologies have been pulled from the market. Already, the pundits are dissecting what went wrong. It is indeed a juicy story,… Read more »
Entrepreneurs – be parsimonious!
I was recently asked by a reporter to comment on the things that entrepreneurs need to purchase to start up a business. Actually, I suggested, entrepreneurs shouldn’t purchase anything – the goal should be to… Read more »
Lightsquared and dirty rotten cheaters!
At Columbia's School of Engineering, I was very pleased to attend the Armstrong lecture given by Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs. He gave a fascinating talk about Qualcomm's founding, how it emerged from a previous company called… Read more »
An application of Discovery Driven Planning by one of Mac’s students
Mac teaches Discovery Driven Planning in his entrepreneurship classes at Wharton, and received the following story about how one of his students applied DDP: Mac, I took your MGMT 802 class earlier this year. I'm… Read more »
Fascinating application of discovery driven planning to social ventures
My dear colleagues Jim Thompson and Ian MacMillan have just published a fascinating description of their work on social entrepreneurship, entitled "Making Social Ventures Work". It's a neat usage of discovery driven planning in an… Read more »
Sagantia Innovation Boot Camp - Kick Starting Innovation
Sagantia is a UK based technology and product development company that I've been studying as part of the research for a new project. Among the many interesting things they do is run an innovation boot… Read more »
Brilliant reflections on skunkworks
Ah, skunkworks. Those small, agile units beloved of large organizations looking for the Next New Idea. I've written about them in the past – and outlined some of the pitfalls of setting them up and… Read more »