Greed corp unable to launch failure professional#

Bottom line? Successful companies cannot innovate from the inside, so they must do it from the outside, any and every way they can. They can also start – or acquire – wholly-owned subsidiaries. They should do this by creating their own venture funds that take major or controlling interests in start-ups. So companies that really want - or need - to innovate need to step outside themselves and not create innovation labs, but innovation subsidiaries of one form or another.

Greed corp unable to launch failure professional#

More accurately, leave the company behind, and under no circumstances threaten the revenue streams that make everyone rich, and never touch the business model that fuels personal and professional wealth.ĭisruptive innovation must occur outside the company.

So what’s the innovation secret? If anything above is accurate, there’s only one way to innovate: disrupt the company, not the business model or key business processes that make all the money. Worse, when there’s no competition they don’t even show up. Research tells us that even when competition stares right in the face of successful companies they still fail the innovation test. So even when the right balance is struck between Bobby and Taylor, the agenda for innovation organizations is often restricted to incremental innovation. No matter how hard they try, they usually fail to disrupt much. Second, for the reasons discussed above, official innovation organizations are usually confined to incremental innovation where risk and funding can be tightly managed. As we’ve learned from Bobby Axelrod and Taylor Mason, companies need structure and opportunism from the smartest people in the room - where algorithms meet instinct. First, too much structure will choke innovation. The challenge for these teams are twofold. Taylor Mason’s algos aside, many companies create innovation organizations designed to structure the innovation process with methods, tools, techniques and templates. (The last cliche: “three strikes and you’re out.”) Finally, disruptive innovation severely challenges existing structures, protocols and ways-of-working. When do you know you’re in trouble? And if there’s no immediate evidence you are, why change anything until you know for sure? Even tougher, how do you estimate how many years you have left to harvest? Proactive disruptive innovation is almost impossible – the second reason why companies fail to innovate. But will the leadership of these industries chase disruptive innovation or will they try to harvest existing business models for as long as they can? By the way, this is a tough decision for any executive, board or consultant to make.

What’s else? Healthcare can only work if it’s disrupted. While it missed the whole Airbnb challenge, what’s next? How should the hotel industry reinvent itself? The same is true for the airline and cruise industries. How should it respond? How should it disrupt itself? Or is the pull to “get back to normal” just too overwhelming? The hotel industry is another example. For decades the old business model persisted until a tsunami named Covid blew into town. Rattle the business model? Why on earth would we want to do that? A good example of this is education. Translation? It doesn’t convert to short-term revenue or profits. Too expensive and not shortsighted enough. Will the new ideas really work? If they don't, will I get egg on my face? And why am I risking anything when things are just fine the way they are?ĭisruptive innovation is mostly unacceptable. Put more politely, companies fail to innovate because their business models, organizational structures and leadership teams find it “difficult” to adjust to new ways of thinking and doing. How about another cliché? “Don’t upset the applecart.” Companies fail to innovate because no one wants to upset the apple carts that buy second homes, pay for expensive educations and keep investors happy. We all know the cliché: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Could that explain what happened at Polaroid, Sears, MySpace, Sears, Xerox, Nokia, Yahoo, JC Penny, Blackberry, RadioShack, Borders and Circuit City? Clayton Christensen says it a little differently, of course, but it’s the flip side of the same coin. Put more crudely, success breeds shades of greed and greed blinds innovation. Successful companies cannot – and will not – get out of the way of their own success.