Part 1 of a 3 part article Every organization wants to innovate and the boards are very supportive of innovation efforts. But how good are you at recognizing the smoke that indicates that innovation is now a priority? An analysis of the great organizations that have not survived disruption in their industry, will show that even great organizations can fail to see the danger signals or grab disruption opportunities. The early warning signs that you and your industry should be

Recently, the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi, repeated his call for India Inc to innovate. He is amongst a large group of world leaders who have been consistently calling for innovation to meet strategic goals of the world, including the UN SDG goals. By now it should be clear to most business leaders that innovation is essential not only for their own longevity but also for the planet to remain sustainable. However, the world continues to struggle with innovation

Let’s assume you have the money and time to spend. Would you go on a journey without a goal or plan? Much as everyone would love to travel, doing so without a goal or a plan is not something most would. If you indeed did so, be prepared for uncertain outcomes. However, that is what many organizations are doing with innovation and digital transformation. Organizations are venturing into innovation and digital initiatives without specific goal or a plan. Even though one can arg

Recently, we had 30 participants at the #worldinnovationcircle event in Chennai. The event was hosted by TiEChennai and cosponsored by Innovation 360 Group AB and Think Horizon Consulting LLP. The participants identified challenges with respect to innovation in their organizations. Not surprisingly, lack of innovation goals, strategy and culture were the top concerns. We are regularly finding that that while organizations want to innovate, they fail to set the agenda; specif

A powerful way to analyze the innovation capability of an organization is to use the Innovation 360 framework. This framework was described by Magnus et al in the book “How to Assess and Measure Business Innovation” (Magnus Penker, Peter Junermark, and Sten Jacobson. “How to Assess and Measure Business Innovation, 2017). In this framework, they have identified 66 underlying innovation capabilities and mapped them to 16 aspects (lenses) shown in the wheel of innovation (see fi

For registration write to akhila@tiechennai.org or krishnan@thinkhorizonconsulting.com or Click Here. Join us to: Test drive one of the world's most sophisticated innovation management tools, sharpen your innovation strategy, and receive a customized analysis and benchmarking on your organization based on the innovation capabilities of over 5,000 organizations in more than 105 countries. Learn from a comprehensive history of innovation, including the specific theory and succe

This is the 5th part of a series of article on innovation. You will find links to the earlier posts at the end of this blog. Disruptive innovations are game-changers. They bring new customers and jobs. They also seem to be happening with a distinct pattern; disruptive innovations are less likely from the industry leaders. Established players seem to be so ensconced with their position that they are rarely disrupting their industry themselves. This despite the well-known quote

This is the 4th part of a series of article on innovation. You will find links to the earlier posts at the end of this blog. The concept of disruptive technology and disruptive business concepts was defined by Assink in 2006 (Assink, M. (2006). Inhibitors of disruptive innovation capability: a conceptual model. European Journal of Innovation Management, 9(2), pp.215-233.). In his paper, Assink described disruptive technologies as being applicable to existing markets of an org

A survey by CBInsights in 2018 of 677 global leaders, (CB Insights Research. (2020). State of Innovation 2018. [online] Available at: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/ state-of-innovation-2018/), showed that 1. 84.9% rate innovation is most important for their organization 2. 41% of executives said their companies are extremely at risk or very at risk of disruption 3. Despite the importance attached, 78% of innovation portfolios are focussed on iterating and improvi

This is part 3 of a series of articles on innovation In part 2 of the series (https://www.thinkhorizonconsulting.com/post/changing-the-known-sustaining-innovation-to-protect-the-core-business), I wrote about how organizations should go about innovating their core offering. This can take the shape of sustaining innovation (replacing your existing offering with a better product or even a significant technological innovation) or efficiency improvement (significantly improve cost

This article is part 2 of this series on innovation strategies. Links to other parts are below In the first part, we defined 3 types of innovation, changing the known, changing the boundaries and changing the game for the business. Core innovation is about changing the known for the organization. Every organization must consider innovating its core, there simply is no escaping from this need. Every market and product goes through multiple stages; emergent, growth, maturity an

2019 is like no other year the Indian industry has faced. Multiple sectors such as infrastructure, power, construction, banking, automotive, etc are in serious crisis. Growth is down to 4%. Companies are fighting for growth through market share gain as the industry growth rates are tapering. Disruption is rampant in many sectors. Sectors like IT are seeing job losses at senior levels as they are seeing the disruption of their business. Can businesses learn from the past? The

A lot of business people that I meet are puzzled by the ongoing dialogue about innovation. To most of them, innovation is something that doesn’t apply to them, they believe that they aren’t inventors or product developers. How do we innovate without inventions? Tell you what Airbnb didn’t have to invent anything new while creating the largest hotel chain Uber didn’t have to invent anything new while creating the largest taxi business in the world They have been copied world o

Why are some companies more successful than others? How are some companies managing to launch one innovation after another, while others remain one innovation wonders? Magnus Penker concluded that it’s not a matter of luck, not just talent, a well-connected board or even funding choices. He concluded that each organization has its own individual seeds of success or failure and repeatable success depends on nurturing the right combination of elements with precision. These he h

One of the challenges faced by organizations face is in deciding where to focus their innovation efforts. Most organizations end up focussing all their innovation efforts on creating new products. Such an approach is neither wise nor adequate. Innovation needs to move beyond new products. Of course you need to focus on creating new and innovative products. However, the focus needs to be on the customer offer and you need to approach the product innovation from a new angle of

We have observed that categories of “non customers” exist for consulting companies as well. The first category are companies who have used a consultant in the past and will never use one again due to a bad experience. The second are companies which have needs but are vary of consultants; they have heard too many consultant jokes, have heard stories of bad experience or misunderstand the role consultants play (suited booted people with fancy degrees, charging fancy fees for ad

Note: This is based on #BlueOcean thinking and you will find extensive articles on the web. One of the biggest challenges for companies is to ensure that they remain competitive over a long period of time. Time and again we find that once blue eyed boys of the market struggle while some one else outshines them; think Microsoft and Apple. A powerful tool to visualize whether you are going to struggle in a red ocean or swim in a blue ocean is the tool PMS map, developed by W. C

#innovation; #innovationculture One of the recent insights for me, from the work of Innovation360 group, was on the subject of innovation culture mapping. Innovation360 have developed a powerful InnoSurvey ® tool to analyse innovation capabilities of an organisation. The culture mapping is part of the capability assessment and maps the innovation culture. The culture mapping tool is based on the model developed by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Chen

Originally published in LinkedIn by Krishnan Naganathan in July 2018 Many traditional organisations have recognised the need for innovation. They have identified task forces, champions and consultants. They have set up an ideation platform and process. And still they can’t achieve anything more than incremental improvements. What’s going wrong? There seem to be multiple factors that seem to limit organisations ability to innovate 1.    Most employees in the organisation are s