Strategy
To properly manage a corporate innovation portfolio, I often refer to the "120 Rule", to explain that innovation is a quantitative game. A few days ago, I picked up the following data on the gross multiple U.S. venture capital firms would get on their initial startup investments.
Weak Signals
In our age of data supposedly reigning supreme, our data culture is still very coarse. The two most simple issues we're still struggling with in my experience? How much of a sample size do you need to get to statistical relevance and correlation is not causation. Both of
Newsletter
Many budget cuts may be underway for innovation departments in the following months. Blame poor visibility of your actions, the abrupt end of a golden age, or the poor example that major tech companies have been lately. The question is, what could you do about it?
Weak Signals
In 2016, Clayton Christensen (father of the Innovator's Dilemma and professor extraordinaire at Harvard Business School) discovered that products didn't have intrinsic value and formatted the "job to be done" principle. In his own words: For me, this is a neat idea. When we
Hot Takes
A few weeks ago, I gave a webinar for one of France's largest insurance companies on how the Dutch developed the bike, not as a mobility or technology layer but as a full-on urban design paradigm. The title broadly translates as "How to make biking a success
Weak Signals
Last June, I was pointing out how being able to seamlessly use the iPhone as a Mac webcam was speaking volumes about how Apple is not a product company, but a fully integrated hardware and software platform. I didn't mean to make a recurring theme of this "
Hot Takes
Yesterday, Google killed Stadia, their game streaming project. A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategyWe’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.GooglePhil Harrison The idea of game streaming is neat. In principle, with a fast-enough internet connection, you don'
Beginner
One innovation tool we often use is the "canary in the coal mine." I've been illustrating and writing about quite a few in different contexts these last few years but never really explained the tool and how to use it. So, here goes...
Weak Signals
In 2018, a 5th grader mathematics problem given in a school in China took some part of the internet by storm. The problem was as follows: If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain? You might want to pause on
Strategy
For years, Apple has been vastly underrated in many sectors, such as mobile or games, and now as an ad or financial service company. Mostly the reason is that Apple until it's late in the game, doesn't game a significant market share. Their focus is never
Hot Takes
Last July, Siemens unveiled their new business accelerator dedicated to the metaverse. And before you start running away, thinking they are selling snake oil – as everyone pretty much when using the M word – think again. While Siemens CEO Roland Busch half-heartedly evokes the consumer metaverse "revolution," he then
Hot Takes
Most of the tech and digital news this year has been depressing, if you ask me. Between Andreessen Horowitz investing upward of $350 million in the new Adam Neumann grift or Marc Zuckerberg gambling the future of Meta on us wearing cumbersome 3D helmets, the little world of digital tech