Weak Signals
Imagine you're the Mars company, and your best-seller product is the iconic candy bar with nougat and caramel coated with milk chocolate. Now answer this question: Who are your most *direct* competitors? Can you list as quickly as possible five or six of them? I give you a
Toolbox
One of the most requested frameworks I often have from corporate customers is how Gartner's hype and innovation diffusion work together. To my knowledge, this is weirdly never discussed. So despite this summer's heat waves here goes...
Hot Takes
A series of micro-interviews with people we work with. Partners in crime, current or former customers, all have a unique view on innovation and the current zeitgeist. Five questions on innovation, short answers. We might agree, we might disagree. No context, no comments.
Weak Signals
When we mistakenly think that products and features are center-stage for winning the market over, it's worth remembering what happened to Slack and why network effects are such game-breakers in business. Slack is a SaaS team collaboration software that was launched in 2013 and managed to recruit a
Hot Takes
Being an expert at something is sometimes difficult to discuss, prove, or even validate from your perspective – not to mention from a potential customer's perspective! There are usually two ways to pick an expert: social proof and some seniority—someone recommended by others who has accumulated enough time
Weak Signals
As much as network effects have been the beating heart of the digital wave that submerged most markets since the early 2000s, in the eighties, they were still very much underappreciated. Michael Dertouzos on NBC’s Today Show, August 8, 1983. pic.twitter.com/EIyNprSjgX — MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) August
Newsletter
We collectively still conflate progress and innovation. Not that progress doesn't exist, but it's anything but an immutable law of physics, like gravity or the speed of light. Here are my two cents on science, technology, innovation, and progress.
Hot Takes
A series of micro-interviews with people we work with. Partners in crime, current or former customers, all have a unique view on innovation and the current zeitgeist. Five questions on innovation, short answers. We might agree, we might disagree. No context, no comments.
Culture
I just read about an intriguing signal about incumbent big retailers. The TL;DR is that companies like Nordstrom or CVS are increasingly tweaking their C-suites structures by naming executives at specific roles to adjust to the explosive growth of e-commerce. Does it read like 2012 news? Kind of. Here&
Hot Takes
In an unexpected move, Y Combinator, the historic mothership of the startup economy, will downsize its next wave of startup funding to 250 companies, down from more than 400. This is one event in an avalanche of recent news about startups downsizing or VC funds going bust (Softbank Vision Fund
Strategy
We make a lot of fuss about innovation frameworks and strategies, whereas innovation is a simple mechanism. It's about Reimagining, Diversification, and from time to time a rare but groundbreaking Reduction.
Most of what is call the tech sector that went under explosive growth these last ten years has been built around digital consumer platforms; what I often derogatorily call the pizza-delivery sector. The underlying reasons have been pretty clear for a while: the incredible power of network effects build online,