A summary of things you should know about The Dream Cafe according to Geoff Crook: Introduction In this episode Geoff Crook reveals all his insights on his book, The DreamRead More
The post A Preview of The Dream Cafe with Geoff Crook appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Geoff Crook reveals all his insights on his book, The Dream Cafe, where he provides a guide for harnessing creativity and developing a brand designed to disrupt any market.
In his book Crook and co-author Duncan Bruce developed a fresh, innovative approach that is used by major businesses and is designed to product radical innovation that leads to unpredictable outcomes. The goal of the book is to show you how to transform any big business idea into a market disruptor, develop a competitive advantage by taking risks, and effectively implement massive innovation.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who possess a very creative mindset and need a practical guide for turning fresh ideas into highly profitable business ventures that will redefine any market.
The Dream Cafe identifies a crucial president called the avant-garde. Those people who met together in cafes or other venues and people who came from all kinds of disciplines but had in common the passion for challenging convention and changing the world. It was those people that invented the future. And so basically The Dream Cafe takes the position that in the world of uncertainty it really helps if you could look back to a president of people who learned how to do it well and managed to do it systematically across 150 years.
This book is written to allow people to step in and step out of.
Trust your instinct, believe in the potential of serendipity, and recognize that chaos creates opportunity.
If you take the argument that chaos is an opportunity rather than a threat then essentially what you need to come to terms with are some of the qualities which are inherent in the way in which the avant-garde think about the world. Moving in to the notion that dreaming is important and anytime you look at any discipline that created some kind of major disruptive innovation in the world it’s a mystery that kind of fuels you. From there you can grab hold of that stuff and shape it into something that allows you to invent the future. The notion of experimentation has to be a permanent state of being for any competitive business and the book suggest that experimentation is absolute embracing the right to fail. It understands that failure should be part of the innovation process. Other important areas are the idea of habitat and the multisensory space. Multisensory space is the idea that we are only at this threshold of realizing and capitalizing on how extraordinary we are as humans. I suggest that you shouldn’t even think about trying to disrupt this world until you can disrupt yourself.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:59
“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” – Marcel Duchamp
I am passionate about creativity and absolutely committed to the idea that disruption allows you to create better futures. I worked at Central Saint Martin’s college as a director of imagination and application and created a master’s program called Applied Imagination which broke just about every rule in education. I’ve done a lot of freelancing in the branding/marketing area and that’s where I got to meet Duncan who I then collaborated with on creating The Dream Cafe.
Frustration was the primary inspiration. It was frustration that the majority of businesses was confronting the context of market unpredictability by investing in trained insight rather than innovation and was simply failing to notice the difference.
Experience and Nature by John Dewey
Buy The Dream Cafe by Geoff Crook on Amazon today
Visit TheDreamCafe.eu.com to learn more about the book
Follow Geoff Crook on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
The Business Idea Factory by Andrii Sedniev
Disruption by Design by Paul Paetz
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps To Promote Innovation At The Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Dream Cafe with Geoff Crook appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Crossing the Chasm according to Geoffrey Moore: Introduction In this episode Geoffrey Moore shares all his insights on his bestselling book, CrossingRead More
The post A Preview of Crossing The Chasm with Geoffrey Moore appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Geoffrey Moore shares all his insights on his bestselling book, Crossing the Chasm, where he discusses his revised and updated expertise on marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers.
In his book Moore provides dozens of successful high-tech marketing examples, his in-depth research on technology adoption models for high-tech consumers, and many new marketing strategies that are specifically built for bring high-tech products to larger markets. The goal of the book is to help you master the Technology Adoption Life cycle and accelerate your marketing efforts.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are selling high-tech products that are new the market and need help broaden their marketing efforts to cover all segments of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
Most of the books in high-tech marketing understood that there were early adopters but they hadn’t recognized that there was this chasm separating the early adopters from everybody else. And as a result they thought they could just transition across very smoothly but in fact we lost many high-tech startups to the chasm.
I designed the book to be read from front to back.
The notion that when you are crossing the chasm you have to show up with a complete solution. The only way that is really feasible is if you specialize in one particular use case. So it’s the idea of pick a single use case and make sure it’s one that’s very urgent and compelling.
The key thing of the first part of the book is that we use a framework called the Technology Adoption Life Cycle to help entrepreneurs understand how high-tech markets develop. The key idea that we insert into it is this chasm idea which is the early adopting market really aligns with the entrepreneur very voluntarily. And the chasm then separates them from the rest of the marketplace which is more skeptical and pragmatic. So the strategy for marketing high-tech changes dramatically when it’s time to cross the chasm.
The last 2/3 of the book puts out a playbook and it’s organized around five key principles, there are five chapters in the playbook. The first chapter is when you cross the chasm you have to go initially to a very targeted niche market of people who have a very urgent and compelling use case for your new technology. The next thing you have to do is sit down and work through the target customer and the compelling reason to buy.
That lets you go to the third chapter in this book which is called Symbol the Invasion Force. The idea here is to bring together the other partners in the ecosystem that are necessary to work with you in order to solve that use case that the target customer has.
Once you have that then you can go to what we call Define the Battle which is the fourth of these chapters. And that is who is your competition and how are you positioned differently?
The last one is launching the invasion which has to do with your distribution strategy and your pricing strategy and how to pull that together to make that work.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:01
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” – Geoffrey Moore
I have an academic background originally; I was going to be a professor of English. But back in the 70’s I moved out to California, joined a high-tech firm, and been involved in tech marketing and high tech strategy since 1978. In the late 80’s I worked with a company called Regis McKenna and it gave me a chance to write this book which originally came out in 1990-1991.It’s about marketing and selling products to mainstream customers.
It was that high-tech firms would have experience of having early success with a handful of customers who were very enthusiastic about their disruptive innovation and that would make them think that they were ready to pour on the gas. And it just felt like the marketing kept on collapsing underneath them every time and this happened often enough that we knew we needed to find a solution and tell others about it.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Regis Touch by Regis McKenna
Buy Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore on Amazon today
Visit GeoffreyAMoore.com to learn more about Geoff and his book
Follow Geoffrey Moore on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
Pocket Man by Scott Jordan
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Marketing and Branding
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Crossing The Chasm with Geoffrey Moore appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Innovation in the Family Business according to Joe Schmieder: Introduction In this episode Joe Schmieder shares his book, Innovation in the FamilyRead More
The post A Preview of Innovation in the Family Business with Joe Schmieder appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Joe Schmieder shares his book, Innovation in the Family Business where he takes a thoughtful look at innovation in the family business industry.
In his book Schmieder shares a variety of insights and best practices applicable to family businesses more generally. The goal of the book is to help you dissect the relevant data and provide a working framework with which you can innovate your own family business and stay relevant to your specific market niche.
This book is perfect for family business leaders or any executive leading a family owned business who is in search looking to reinvent or implement the best practices for family businesses.
The first differentiator is that we are combining innovation and the family business into one book. The books that are available on the topic are mainly academic research manuals so I have combined the research material with about 50 family business stories to help describe the many different areas where family firms have been able to effectively use innovation to grow the value of their business. The book is a combination of research and hands-on practical examples of how family businesses have effectively used innovation in their firms.
It’s definitely a jump in, jump out kind of book. It’s not a real long book so you can also read through the whole thing.
Developing a culture of innovation is the most important thing in the family businesses. So creating the culture of innovation is the biggest takeaway from this book.
In chapter one, discussing the family business difference, I talk about the family business difference and how to capitalize on it for innovation. So I am detailing the innovation drivers and set it apart from other businesses and these refer to things like the trait of having a long-term horizon compared to public companies. And also the fact that family businesses have been phenomenally successful at incremental innovation verses breakthrough type ground breaking innovation. We also layout the differences how families use innovation in other areas of the business like in their organization structure. And how they are using succession in an innovative way as well as training the upcoming generation to be more innovative.
In chapter two I talk about creating a culture of innovation and how one family in particular created a framework called structured chaos. Structure chaos is a way to have some stability and structure in business while still being free flowing and chaotic enough where you can have an innovative spirit. In this chapter we take some of the drivers that were discussed in chapter one and show how they can be used to create an innovative culture that can infuse the organization with a mindset that embraces change whether than fighting it.
Chapter three is one of the longest chapters which is on product and service offerings, new ventures and startups. And that is what it takes to create a process for innovation. I outline in this chapter four different processes that are used out there for product and service development. But the conclusion is that you don’t have to strictly follow any of these one processes but rather create a process tailored for your company and follow the process, have it become part of the culture so that it’s not just done in a verbal context.
Chapter four is about funding and measuring innovation. It’s difficult to find examples of this because people don’t always fund innovation in a clear way. So how to capture different sources of funding in a family business are described and then the types of metrics used to measure innovation from a percent of sales coming from new product to how successful succession has gone is all described in this chapter.
In chapter five I dive into the next generation which could be siblings or cousins that are coming into the family business and what it takes to re-innovate or re-energize or reinvent the family business. As many know today the pace of change is so rapid that if people aren’t looking ahead and trying to figure out what the next offering should be then they are going to slip behind. In today’s world the younger generation is so much more attuned to digital marketing and digital means that it’s a great opportunity for them to dive into re-innovating a family business through some type of digital approach of format.
The sixth and seventh chapters deal with governance and succession. Sixth is talking about leadership succession and that means passing the business from the current leader to other leaders. I also talk quite a bit about governance and that is how to use advisory boards and family counsels to help with the relationships that support innovation in a family business.
In the eighth chapter I talk about moving innovation forward and what it takes collectively to make sure that your family business is being innovative and that means making change that is meaningful and adds value to the business.
“Developing a culture of innovation is not only necessary, it is more exciting and fun than just sticking with the status quo.” – Unknown
I am a family business advisor; I have been working with family businesses for over 35 years. I ran two family businesses as an executive for 25 years and I have been consulting with family businesses for the last 10 years.
I was very interested in helping family businesses continue their firms for more than one, two or three generations. So I worked on the book to help family members and executives who are interested in innovating in the family business. And I also try to inspire those enterprising family members to focus more energy and resources on innovation and change throughout their family business instead of just relying on the status quo. I have this passion to make sure we can keep family businesses strong because they do generate the majority of the income and the jobs throughout our economy.
Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge
Buy Innovation in the Family Business by Joe Schmieder on Amazon today
Visit TheFBCG.com to learn more about the company, advisors, and all the books
Follow Joe Schmieder on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber
CoupleCEO by Heidi and Scott Shimberg
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Innovation in the Family Business with Joe Schmieder appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about The Seven Sins of Innovation according to Dave Richards: Introduction In this episode Dave Richards takes a deep dive into his book,Read More
The post A Preview of The Seven Sins of Innovation with Dave Richards appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Dave Richards takes a deep dive into his book, The Seven Sins of Innovation, where he discusses 7 causes of success or failure for innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors.
In his book Richards shares examples and case studies from some of the most well-known organizations and demonstrates how individual and group psychology must be engaged effectively to create entrepreneurial cultures capable of powerful innovation. The goal of his book is to provide you with a guide to applying the model, finding the right external resources, and involving people effectively.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs, business leaders, or managers attempting to start, reinvent, or grow an organization of any kind.
A lot of books on innovation tend to be quite academic or theoretical. Also a lot of great stories about entrepreneurship and innovation are really personal stories. My book is more about trying to make sense of it all and draw together various theories and practicalities of innovation. And pointing out why most efforts fail but also what to do about it in practical terms.
There are sections of the book that are devoted to specific types of enterprises. So there are sections that I think might be of interest to specific readers but I’ve tried to write them in a way that they are applicable to any type of innovation effort or any type of entrepreneurship.
I think it’s that the success or failure of any innovation effort or any entrepreneurial effort is really all about the people. If you are successful it’s going to be because of the people and if you fail it’s because of the people.
I start with definitions and the reason I start with definitions of basic concepts is because looking at the literature on these topics I see a lot of inconsistency. I define innovation in terms of creation and value and I define entrepreneurship as anyone trying to innovate. I felt we needed to rethink our concepts of innovation and rethink our whole approach to how we are trying to innovate. From there we move into talking about why it’s so difficult. The reality in the world of innovation is the vast majority of innovation efforts fail to deliver the desired results.
The seven sins are looking at the fundamental reasons underlined the failure of most innovation efforts. And of course with every sin there is a corresponding virtue. After going through the various sins of innovation I get into specific prescriptions for how to succeed.
The first key sin of innovation is pointless purpose. Pointless purpose can come in many different forms but it is fundamentally all about an entrepreneur not having a really strong connection to a purpose. One of the most common forms of that is what I call the technology push. This is when really clever technologists come up with a so called solutions and conceptually throw it over the wall and say I have the solution now where is the problem. What are you trying to do as an entrepreneur to make the world a better place? If your innovation isn’t connected to some fundamental purpose than in my view it is pointless.
The second sin we talk about is impaired vision. Your vision for success is fundamentally connected to purpose but takes it a step deeper in terms of understanding the specifics of what you’ll achieve.
The third sin is an inability to articulate what you are trying to do. This sin I call apathetic miscommunication. This is miscommunication that can be the result of apathy or lack of the ability to articulate and the inability to express the value that you’re trying to deliver. And to express it in a way that attracts, excites, and influences your potential customers.
The fourth sin is about ambivalent disengagement and failure of relationship.
The fifth sin I call frightfully disempowered followership. In other words the opposite of good leadership is followership and the opposite of empowerment is disempowerment. The virtue as an innovator is to responsibly empower the resources that are required to drive innovation. So if we fail to appropriately empower those resources than fundamentally we are being irresponsible. One of the key things we need to do as leaders of innovation is to appropriately empower and that often means making very tough choices.
The sixth sin I call painfully boring uncreatively.
The seventh sin I call comfortable complacency and it’s related to the realm of motivation. It’s were we implement strategy and it’s the realm of performance and results. In that realm of human behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and motivation, complacency is the big killer for motivation.
The book ends with some specific prescriptions related to different types of enterprises. One of them looks at revitalizing an enterprise which I think a lot of organizations need to look at. I personally believe that leaders in government need to be far more innovative than they are and we need a step change in terms of the ability of public enterprises to deliver value.
“If you’re not living, leading, learning, and loving on the edge you are taking up too much space.” – Dave Richards
I live in the UK but I’m an American and Canadian. I’ve got five great kids, two relatively little ones and we live on the South Coast of England. I work all over the world, I enjoy public speaking, plus I work with a variety of organizations ranging from startups to multinationals essentially helping people create more success.
Essentially it represents a lifetime of learning and an effort to understand why the vast majority of innovation efforts fail.
The Mandala of Being by Richard Moss
Buy The Seven Sins of Innovation by Dave Richards
Visit DrDaveInnovation.com to learn more about Dave and his book
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber | The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | From Idea To Exit by Jeffrey Weber
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Seven Sins of Innovation with Dave Richards appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about The Innovative Entrepreneur according to Daniel Spulber: Introduction In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The InnovativeRead More
The post A Preview of The Innovative Entrepreneur with Daniel Spulber appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The Innovative Entrepreneur, where he shares the economic framework that addresses the motivation, advantages, pressures, consequences, and contributions of the innovative entrepreneur.
In his book, Spulber unveils an economic theory for innovative entrepreneurship that asks why people with new technologies start their own companies. The goal of the book is identify the costs that other companies incur to readjust their focus, and reveal the problems that arise in the market for new technologies.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a passion for creating new ideas and want to know the economical effects of creating their own company based on their ideas.
A lot of experts who do research on entrepreneurs really don’t think that entrepreneurs are that important. My book tries to show a little bit about why entrepreneurs are so important to our country, what they contribute and all along the way I think it yields some insights that may be helpful to individual entrepreneurs.
You can think of the book as a reference work or you can try and catch some of the highlights.
The number one thing that I would like the reader to takeaway is that innovation is a choice.
The book is organized around five major questions. The first big question that a lot of people have asked is what I call the question of entrepreneurial motivation. Why do individuals choose to become innovative entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs have choices; individuals have other possibilities for their time. They may have a day job or other careers in progress and they have to weigh the returns and rewards or their careers against the returns and rewards of choosing to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have other choices, they may have some money that they make investments with or pursue an education. They too have to make a decision whether they want to invest that money in the startup venture. Perhaps most importantly if they decide to be entrepreneurs they face another choice of whether to be a replicative entrepreneur or to pursue innovative entrepreneurship. One of the things that I point at as an answer to this important question is that I think individuals tend to make these choices in the context of the life cycle. In other words entrepreneurship is a way to build personal assets for the future while doing what you love to do. One way of understanding the entrepreneurship decision is not as a snapshot but it’s a major decision that falls within your life cycle decisions.
The second question is what I call the question of innovative advantage. And that is why does it seem that entrepreneurs are better at innovating than existing firms? This is important because a lot of people think that the big firm can do all the innovating. One of the many reason why existing firms can’t do it all is because they are faced with all kinds of inertia. It’s not just that managers are short sighted but rather the existing firm has to fund its existing business and it’s very hard to change directions particularly for big companies. The entrepreneurs have an advantage and that advantage is the key to my book. The advantage is that the entrepreneur is not a big organization or a small organization but they are often an individual and as an individual they have got the initiative. The initiative or personal decision can overcome any kind of inertia. Entrepreneurs bring change because they’ve got initiative and they can overcome the inertia that existing firms face.
The third question my book talks about is competitive pressures. Does competition help or hurt innovation? A lot of people are worried that too much competition hurts innovation but entrepreneurs know that they are going to face challenges and I think it’s really important to have competition and competitive pressures.
The fourth question is about creative destruction. Why do we see creative destruction and why not just sell out and avoid the competition? There are a number of reasons for this and one is that I think often is it is very difficult to sell or license your idea to the existing firm. Another idea is that often the person who comes up with the idea has the best way of realizing it. So even though you might cash out, you might do much better doing it yourself.
The fifth and final question is what I call the question of the wealth of nations. How do entrepreneurs affect the economy? This is really important because I think we’ve forgot that. Right now big companies have a grip on regulation and they have a big influence with the government and essentially it’s made it harder and harder for the little guy to get going. Regulations tend to favor big firms and tax rates tend to penalize individual success and so on. Understanding the important contribution that entrepreneurs make to the economy will help motivate entrepreneurs and it will shed a little bit of light on the public policy’s that we need to open the door to startups.
“The innovated entrepreneur is the man on the spot.” – Daniel Spulber
I am a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University here in Evanston Illinois. I have been teaching entrepreneurship and all kinds of topics for a long time so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Entrepreneurs are so important because they provide the creativity, the drive and the initiative that drives our economy forward. I wanted to make sure that entrepreneurs themselves had a better understand of the major contributions that they are making to our society. I also wanted public policy makers and experts in the field to have a better understanding of what entrepreneurship is and what it means to our country.
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Buy The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber on Amazon today
Visit Kellogg.NorthWestern.edu to learn more about Daniel and his studies
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | Inside The Box by Drew Boyd | The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Innovative Entrepreneur with Daniel Spulber appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail Introduction In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations whereRead More
The post A Preview of Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail
In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations where he shows you how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become exponential.
In his book, Ismail unveils years of research learning how organizations can accelerate growth through the use of technology. The goal of the book is to provide you with the knowledge to leverage assets such as big data, communities, algorithms, and new technology to achieve performance ten times better than your competition.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a guide for harnessing and strategizing the hyper growth of a company that feeds off of modern technology in the 21st century and beyond.
Because we focus on accelerating technologies and the future we identified an inflection point in how we build businesses that has never noticed before.
You can jump in as needed but I would suggest reading the first two chapters first because it lays the premise and basis of the book.
As we finish the book the core economic basis of these new exponential organizations kind of bubbled up. When you are building and running a business you are worried about money and cost of supply and worried about cost of demand. The internet allowed us to drop our cost of demand exponentially.
We open chapter one basically by saying the world is moving exponentially quicker. As we digitize things we hop onto what we call Moore’s Law and the pace of change moves very, very quickly at an accelerating pace. Where we saw computers move at this pace over the last 50 to 60 years based on Moore’s Law we’re not seeing six, seven or eight technologies hop onto that same curb. The first chapter is to give a hard reality check that the world is moving more quickly than we’ve ever seen it before and we give some specifics on how that works.
The second chapter talks about our organizational structures and the fact that how we organize ourselves is very linear and has been for a long time. All of our businesses have inherited a local and linear characteristic where if you had twice as big of a farm you need twice as many people to farm it. We are seeing today that an information based environment actually accelerates and doesn’t just stay linear. We are seeing new organizations that are scaling at an accelerating rate and not just as a multiplier. In this chapter we teach you how to make your organization adapt to this new accelerated pace.
Chapter three looks at the five externalities of these organizations and I open this chapter by saying all these exponential organizations have one single visionary mission statement characteristic. Each has what I call an MTP (Massive transformative purpose). Chapter three continues to describe five externalities and map onto the acronym SCALE. S stands for Staff on Demand. C stands for Community and Crowd. The A stands for Algorithms. The L stands for leveraged Assets. And the E stands for Engagement.
Chapter four dives into the five internal control mechanisms that these organizations are using to manage and track themselves. This maps on to the word IDEAS. The I stands for Interface Processes. The D stands for Dashboards. The E stands for Experimentation. The A stands for Autonomy. And the S stands for Social Technologies. What we found is if you implement four out of the 10 attributes that we described in chapter three and four you will get to the 10x level.
Chapter five summarizes all of it and explains the implications of this new model. This chapter goes through a whole set of implications about how to think about the future.
The second half of the book, chapter six to chapter ten, explains how to apply it. Chapter six is about how to apply this to a startup. And when you are starting a company from scratch what sequence to go in. This chapter will give you the specific steps to take to launch a startup with these principles in mind.
Chapter seven is about how to apply this to a midmarket company. There are a lot of midmarket family style businesses that have grown early on but have now plateaued and this is about taking that and blowing it open.
Chapter eight is about how to organize a big company because you can’t take a big organization and turn it in to one of these new animals, it’s too disruptive of a change. What you need to do is take a disruptive set of changes agents that exist in all organizations and build one of these exponential organizations off the edge of your own attacking in another marketplace.
Chapter nine is a set of nine success stories of what big companies are doing.
In the final chapter we talk about the role of the executive in the future.
“Any organization built for success in the 20th century is doomed for failure in the 21st century.” – David Ross
I am the founding executive director and currently global ambassador for Singularity University. Our mission statement at Singularity University is to create a new generation of leadership that can leverage accelerating technologies to solve major global problems. I have been doing this for about six years and was the head of innovation at Yahoo and Tech Entrepreneurship before that.
As we launched Singularity six years ago we noticed at the same time that a very different model has become of how we build organizations. We’ve learned how to scale technology really well but scaling the organization and building that is painfully incrementally and linear. In the last five years or so we are seeing a new breed of organizational structure that can scale in the same seamless way that we scale technology. I noticed that as a weak signal five years ago, started tracking it, and over the last three years we have found over 60 organizations that are scaling at an average 10 times better, faster and cheaper compared to their peers. We started documenting those 60 organizations and tracking them and decided to write a book on the model.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
Buy Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail on Amazon today
Visit ExponentialOrgs.com take the diagnostic survey and learn more about the book
Visit SingularityU.org to learn more about Singularity University
Follow Salim Ismail on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about The Innovator’s Method according to Nathan Furr: Introduction In this episode Nathan Furr gives a detailed summary of his book, The Innovator’sRead More
The post A Preview of The Innovator’s Method with Nathan Furr appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Nathan Furr gives a detailed summary of his book, The Innovator’s Method. This book provides the ideal process of an innovator’s phase: the insight, problem, solution, and business model. We acquire information by observing the glitches around us and present a solution. Digging deep will find us an explanation and creating a business model to market the proper need. Whether you are an entrepreneur launching a start-up or re-establishing a present one, this book is an excellent resource.
One thing is that we are trying to synthesize all these different perspectives. By synthesizing what is common across these methods we can get a richer and fuller view of the innovation process. The second thing is we did a bunch of research on how entrepreneurs and managers apply the innovators method. The third thing is it expresses the need to think seriously when we manage uncertainty.
I recommend you blow through it from beginning to end and then go back for reference.
The one principle that I would want the reader to take away is that if you are facing uncertainty you need to employ a different way to manage that uncertainty. The different way is to identify your unexamined assumptions, design a liable but low cost and rapid experiment to test that assumption and lastly you need to change when you discover what the answer is.
At the heart of this book there is an end to end process that is laid out and what we saw was common across the innovators we studied. We lay this process out as four steps before you start to scale up the business. These four steps are insight, problems, solutions and business model.
Insight is all about looking for surprises in the world around you. These surprises are the clues or symptoms of a deeper customer need.
Once you’ve got insight we then propose the need to understand the costumer problem or job to be done. Here we provide tools and test to help you figure out the need of your customers.
After you deeply understand the need you can then work on the solution to the need. In this section we talk about how you can leverage four hipper rapid prototypes to get a solution that delights customers and almost sales itself.
Lastly you want to align the business model by discovering the right go-to market strategy.
After you have taken these four steps you are now ready to scale the business.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 07:17
“Innovators innovate, customers validate.” – Nathan Furr
I earned my Ph.D. at Stanford University in the Stanford technology ventures program. I’ve worked in management consulting, I’ve been an entrepreneur, worked in venture capital and across those experiences I wanted to spend some time sharing some of the insights that I discovered along the way.
When I was at Stanford I used to hear disparaging comments about business schools and management and I wondered why I was hearing such negative things. As I started to dig into history I discovered something surprising and that was that management schools did not exist until the late industrial revolution. Business schools where founded to manage problems of relative certainty and what we left unanswered were how to manage uncertainty.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Buy The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr on Amazon today
Visit TheInnovatorsMethod.com to learn more about Nathan and his book
Follow Nathan Furr on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Inside The Box by Drew Boyd
The Seven Sins of Innovation by Dave Richards
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Innovator’s Method with Nathan Furr appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>