This helpful resource contains tools and tricks to help companies excel in dynamic markets and provide groundbreaking products and services. The authors refer to this as “innovation” rather than “strategic planning,” but the truth is somewhere in-between: through a proven five-phase discovery process --for staging, aligning, exploring, creating, and mapping--strategic innovation will become a company-wide competency. In The Power of Strategy Innovation, you’ll learn how to: apply innovative thinking to your company’s business model to bridge the gap between strategy and product development; how to remain flexible, future-oriented, and responsive to market changes and your clients’ changing needs; and how to create a perpetual flow of viable new business opportunities. Informative interviews with corporate leaders dispersed throughout the book provide further insight into different industries and the ways they have committed to taking a more innovative approach. Through these shared methodologies, The Power of Strategy Innovation will forever transform the way you do business--and help you rise to become a leader in your industry.

A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits As many companies have lost confidence in the traditional ways of running a business, design thinking has entered the mix. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources. An essential guide for any business seeking to use design thinking as a problem-solving tool as well as a business method to transform companies and cultures The framework is based on work developed by the author for an executive program in Design Thinking taught in Harvard Graduate School of Design Author Idris Mootee is a management guru and a leading expert on applied design thinking Revolutionize your approach to solving your business's greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.

As we continue in an era of simultaneous innovation and commoditization, enabled by digital technologies, managers around the world are asking themselves "how can we both adapt to rapid changes in technology and markets, and still make enough money to survive - and thrive?" To provide answers to these important and urgent questions, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Michael Cusumano draws on nearly 30 years of research into the practices of global corporations that have been acknowledged leaders and benchmark setters - including Apple, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Toyota, Sony, Panasonic, and others in a range of high-technology, services, and manufacturing industries. These companies have also encountered major challenges in their businesses or disruptions to their core technologies. If we look deeply enough, he contends, we can see the ideas that underpin the management practices that make for great companies, and drive their strategic evolution and innovation capabilities. From his deep knowledge of these organizations, Cusumano distils six enduring principles that he believes have been - in various combinations - crucial to their strategy, innovation management practices, and ability to deal with change and uncertainty. The first two principles - platforms (not just products), and services (especially for product firms) - are relatively new and broader ways of thinking about strategy and business models, based on Cusumano's latest research. The other four - capabilities (not just strategy or positioning), the "pull" concept (not just push), economies of scope (not just scale), and flexibility (not just efficiency) - all contribute to agility, which is a mix of flexibility and speed. Many practices associated with these ideas, such as dynamic capabilities, just-in-time production, iterative or prototype-driven product development, flexible design and manufacturing, modular architectures, and component reuse, are now commonly regarded as standard best practices. These six enduring principles are essential in a new world dominated by platforms and technology-enabled services.

This new book explores how firms achieve competitive advantage in a disruptive, digital and globalized business landscape. An integrative framework, ‘The Four Rs of Competitive Success’, is introduced, which covers the four core pillars of global strategy: resources and capabilities, technology and innovation (recombination), internationalization and international markets (reach), and physical and virtual location (roots). It then explains how competitive advantage is achieved through an interaction of these four drivers against the backdrop of a globalized and digitized world. It is uniquely practical in its approach, combining theoretical understanding with international case studies and real-life examples throughout each chapter, including Apple, IKEA and Microsoft. Unlocking Strategic Innovation is concise, applied reading for postgraduate students studying international business, corporate strategy, innovation and digital strategy, as well as academics in the field. It will also be important reading for practitioners looking to gain further understanding of how firms compete and flourish in a global and technology-driven environment.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage. This distinctive approach has three key elements: It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive. The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose. Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way. In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges. Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

The power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity: lessons from a Black professional’s journey through corporate America. Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity. Bethune, who began as an engineer at Westinghouse, moved on to Nike (where he designed Air Jordans), and now works as a sought-after consultant on design and innovation, shows how design can transform both individual lives and organizations. In Bethune’s account, diversity, equity, and inclusion emerge as a recurring theme. He shows how, as we leverage design for innovation, we also need to consider the broader ecological implications of our decisions and acknowledge the threads of systemic injustice in order to realize positive change. His book is for anyone who has felt like the “other”—and also for allies who want to encourage anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-ageist behaviors in the workplace. Design transformation takes leadership—leaders who do not act as gatekeepers but, with agility and nimbleness, build teams that mirror the marketplace. Design in harmony with other disciplines can be incredibly powerful; multidisciplinary team collaboration is the foundation of future innovation. With insight and compassion, Bethune provides a framework for bringing this about.

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds—the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google—all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face.

Winner of Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Winner of Donner Prize A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.

Innovative ruptures of traditional boundaries in value chains are requiring companies to rethink how they go to market, what they need to own, what they need to retain and innovate as core competencies, and how they innovatively deal with suppliers and customers. The key message of the book is that the new knowledge-networked innovation economy requires a totally different strategic management mindset, approach and toolbox, and its major value-added is a new strategic management approach and toolbox for the innovation economy - a poised strategy approach. Designed for both managers and advanced business students, the book provides a unique combination of new management theory, selected managerial articles by prominent scholars such as Clayton Christensen, Henry Chesbrough, Sumantra Ghoshal, Quinn Mills, and Peter Senge, and a wide array of real-world case examples including GE, Shell, IBM, HP, BRL Hardy, P&G, Southwest Airlines and McGraw-Hill, within the dynamics of industries such as airlines, energy, telecommunications, wine & beverages, and computing. The authors illustrate powerful new strategic innovation concepts and tools, such as poised strategy for managing multiple business models, poised strategy scorecards (moving beyond the well-known balanced scorecard), the wheel of business model reinvention, and organizational rejuvenation methods. The book includes the concepts of: Poised Strategic Management, Organizational Rejuvenation, Business Models as Platform for Strategy, Poised Scorecards, Identifying Sources of Innovation in Business Ecosystems.