Christopher Golda

I read this Q&A with Lego CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, in the first issue of Monocle magazine almost a year ago. It’s a fascinating look at innovation; rethinking strategy, advantage, etc. When faced with pressures of globalisation and shifts in consumer behavior, Lego made drastic changes to its business. Namely, transforming into an “open source”, “platform” company, developing formal innovation processes, exploring new business models (most notably, Lego Factory) and collaborating with select global partners.

Successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual “lenses” that allow them to pierce the fog of “what is” in order to see the promise of “what could be.” How? By paying close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:

1. Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
2. Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.
3. Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.
4. Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.

Gary Hamel

Umair Haque has posted a paper on Media Innovation in collaboration with Innovaro in which he explores the three forces of successful radical media innovators that are trumping today’s media incumbents.

The reason today’s media incumbents are suffering are threefold. First, a new breed of media revolutionary is building a newer, better media industry, whose economics differ radically from yesterday, and one which requires fundamentally new approaches to strategy and innovation. Second, these revolutionaries are doing so by transforming yesterday’s hapless, powerless, disconnected consumers into connected, empowered, choice-rich, and attention-saturated consumers, whose market power in unison is volatile, explosive, and unpredictable …

The consumer to prosumer language is being noticed by many as a more appropriate way of describing, as Umair puts it, the deceptively simplistic concept of user-generated content. The report examines how markets, networks, and communities are redefining the media industry by promoting a shift from core to edge, to efficiently organize consumption/production and ultimately explode value creation. It’s important for anyone who wants to understand the true value in MySpace, Craigslist, Wikipedia, etc. Read the full paper here.

This is a great piece on innovation (or lack thereof) at Microsoft, and how they’ve managed to become “me too” players in markets. Most notable are zune, soapbox (pretty much all web efforts actually), xbox, etc. Although Google have yet to develop significant revenue stream beyond their search business, at least they’re trying to create value through their 70-20-10 innovation.

Soundtrack: Clipse ft. Pharrell - Mr. Me Too