Live from #Insights2Innovate: Execution in Unexplored Territory
Vijay Govindarajan, Leading Expert on Strategy and Innovation, Best Selling Author, Reverse
Innovation, Professor of International Business at TUCK SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, Thinkers50 Award Winner, kicked off FEI Toronto and Consumer Insights Canada on our last day in Toronto by stating that Strategy is innovation.
Are you currently formulating ideas in Box 1, 2, or 3?
Box 1: Managing the present
Box 2: Selectively forgetting the past
Box 3: Creating the future
How will you be a leader in 2025? How are you allocating resources so that you stay relevant in the next decade? Strategy has nothing to do with competing for the present, only the future.
Strategy is always about how to shift the present so that you can execute in the future.
The Future is now, it's never about what you have to do then, it's all about the now.
Strategic Balance is Key
Box 1: Competition for the present, performance gap, restructuring
Box 2 & 3: Competition for the future, opportunity gap, renewal
Strategy is about breakthrough innovation.
Nonlinear innovation is the same as innovating your strategy.
Reduce the "assumptions to knowledge" ratio.
The Top 11 Things You Can Do With a Dead Horse:
11. Whip the horse a little harder.
10. Change the rider.
9. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
8. Emulate the best practices of companies riding dead horses.
7. Proclaim that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse.
6. Shorten the track.
5. Affirm that 'This is the way we have always ridden this horse.'
4. Declare that 'This horse is not dead.'
3. Have the lawyers bring suit against the horse manufacturer.
2. Engage a consultant to study the dead horse.
1. Promote the dead horse to a senior management position.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Formerly a senior copy editor at Thomson Reuters, a research editor at AOL, and a senior web publicist at Hachette Book Group, Valerie M. Russo is editor at large of The Front End of Innovation Blog, The Market Research Event Blog, The World Future Trends Tumblr, the Digital Impact Blog, and also blogs at Literanista.net. She is the innovation lead and senior social media strategist for the Marketing and Business Strategy Division of the Institute for International Research, an Informa LLC., and her poetry was published in Regrets Only on sale at the MOMA Gift Shop. Her background is in Anthropology and English Literature. You can reach her at vrusso@iirusa.com or @Literanista.
