4/16/08 Mark Johnson & Scott Anthony
Seeing Inside the Black Box of Innovation
Principles, patterns, tips and tricks for sustaining innovation
Today's business world permits companies very little time to enjoy one-time innovation successes. Before you know it, someone's copying you and someone else is going you one better. In this session you'll learn the disciplines necessary to build a true innovation dynasty, where great new ideas keep showing up and competitors' moves and countermoves are blocked even before they can happen.
Looking at the world of innovation in the right way highlights patterns that differentiate successful approaches from failed approaches. Behind the patterns are straightforward principles that can bring great clarity to the often fuzzy world of innovation. Utilizing the principles and the patterns can highlight invisible opportunities and show how to disarm looming competitive threats.
In this session, Mark Johnson and Scott Anthony will describe tips and tricks that will help companies improve their ability to create growth through innovation. Johnson is the chairman, and Anthony is the president, of Innosight, the company Johnson co-founded with Clayton Christensen to build on the revolutionary impact of Christensen's books The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.
From this session, you will learn, among other things, how to:
- Apply proven processes and structures that make innovation repeatable.
- Spot opportunities for growth by focusing on important, unsatisfied "jobs to be done."
- Craft disruptive growth strategies.
- Manage the risks of early-stage projects.
- Create "plans to learn" to systematically address critical assumptions.
Mark Johnson and Scott Anthony have helped companies like Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Johnson & Johnson, and Time Warner improve their ability to create growth through innovation. Their forthcoming book is The Innovator's Guide to Creating New Growth Markets: How to Put Disruptive Innovation to Work.
Mark Johnson is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. He holds two engineering degrees along with his Harvard MBA. With Clayton Christensen, he wrote "Foundations for Growth: How to Build Disruptive New Businesses."
Scott Anthony, who also holds a Harvard MBA, co-authored Seeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change; he has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Advertising Age, andMarketing Management ; and he's the editor of the newsletter, "Strategy & Innovation."
What They've Said
(From presentations, interviews, and articles by Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson):
"The potential to become a has-been has been accelerating . . . The average S&P 500 lifetime in 1950 was 55 years; it was 35 years in 1975; and it's now 15 years. . . Another interesting statistic [from a survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit in 2005]: Over 50 percent of CEOs said that between now and 2010 business model innovation will become more important than product or service innovation. . . I'd like to frame the challenge in a very distinct way. We need to think about innovation in two fundamental circumstances. One is those kinds of innovations that sustain the core - continued incremental improvements to products and services - and those innovations that are fundamentally different - those that create new growth, where you head into new markets, you come up with new fundamental business models. And I think that's really the challenge for corporations today, to manage the tensions of doing both."
"We have seen companies use four different structures to shepherd the creation of new growth businesses. Our belief is that there is no one 'perfect' structure. Rather, companies should take stock of where they expect innovations to come from, the ultimate desired outcome of their innovation efforts, the depth to which they want senior management involved, the extent to which they want to rely on core assets, and the number of people they are prepared to dedicate toward working on new growth initiatives."
"Many executives come at innovation from a product and service innovation side, so there's a big bias toward technological innovation and product development and engineering. The reality of the innovation that we're talking about, which is really coming at the problem of growth and an ability to grow and doing it in a more predictable way through disruptive innovation, means that innovation is much more than just technological. It's business model innovation, it's market innovation, and it's the ability to think in all of those dimensions collectively to really build new growth businesses."
To learn more about Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, and Innosight, go to www.innosight.com.