BLOG ON STRATEGY & INNOVATION
Ideas, tools and frameworks to reimagine strategy, build innovation capability, and lead with purpose in an AI‑transformed world
The Partnership Blind Spot: Why Going It Alone Holds Back Your Growth Potential
Too many organisations rely on an outdated view of partnerships, treating them as transactional rather than transformational.
It is a big blind spot in today’s world where growth opportunities lie in ecosystems, deliberately shaped networks of diverse actors that can solve problems no single organisation can crack alone.
In the seventh article of The Growth Blind Spot series, I explore the Partnership Blind Spot, and how to overcome it.
The Exploration Blind Spot: When Organisations Can't See Beyond Their Core
Most organisations get stuck in what we call the “Exploration Blind Spot”: focusing solely on their core business while missing growth opportunities that lie just beyond their comfort zone.
In the sixth article of the Growth Blind Spots series, I unpack the Exploration Blind Spot and what to do to overcome it.
Melway, A Disruption Story
In this article, I share three enduring lessons on disruption based on the journey of one of Australian most iconic products, Melway:
1. The Customer Job Endures, But the Solution Evolves
2. It’s Always Hard for the Incumbent to React to Disruption
3. The Road to Obsolescence is a Slow Descent
5 Key Insights on AI from Yuval Noah Harari's latest book
In this article , I share five key insights drawn from Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus; insights that every leader navigating the accelerating impact of AI on business and society should understand.
Books that most influenced my work in 2024
In this post I reflect on the most useful books - loosely connected to strategy and innovation - I read in 2024.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
Up-ruption, an interview with Greg Bernarda
During his latest visit to Australia, I took the opportunity to interview Greg Bernarda to shed some light on the up-ruption global movement he’s been leading.
Why is the Innovation Readiness Gap wider than ever?
BCG's latest research highlights a widening innovation readiness gap: never since they started producing this report has the priority of innovation been so high and the innovation readiness been so low!
Drawing from our Vibrance experiences across Australia and abroad in the last 24 months, I delve deeper into the underlying reasons behind this alarming trend.
Where does innovation fit in your growth strategy?
In a large organisation, it is possible for corporate innovation to exist in isolation. Until an Executive pulls the plug one day out of frustration. Corporate innovation can only become sustainable when it’s no longer an isolated practice, and it has become a critical vehicle to deliver strategic growth objectives.
In this blogpost I want to highlight the key question that will guide you towards having innovation closely connected to the overall strategy of an organisation, and then propose a simple framework to clarify your innovation strategy.
Predicting the ROI of Innovation
Anyone involved in corporate innovation will face the challenge of “selling innovation” to the executive team and/or the Board of Directors. The question of the return on investment (ROI) of innovation just keeps popping up. And still no one seems to have cracked it yet.
Indeed, predicting the ROI of innovation can feel like threading a needle in the dark. But while pinpoint precision is out of our grasp, could there be a way to calculate a rough order of magnitude ROI of innovation?
In this article I want to shed light on two essential frameworks and two critical data points that could transform your perspective on innovation ROI.
Books that most influenced my work in 2023
In this post I reflect on the most useful books - loosely connected to strategy and innovation - I read in 2023.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
Do not let fear of failure stifle corporate innovation
In this blogpost I highlight a few simple ideas that can go a long way to reducing the fear of failure that stifle corporate innovation in large organisations.
Tackling that challenge will require first a deep awareness of the problem and then the use of two simple frameworks to help anyone within an organisation identify where and when failure would be safe.
Why is innovation more important than ever?
In my introduction to the Corporate Innovation in Action conference, l shared my experience on why large organisations innovate and my convictions on why innovation is more important than ever today.
You can watch the recording here.
Books that most influenced my work in 2022
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on strategy and innovation I read in 2022.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
What changes when you start scaling?
A lack of awareness and readiness can seriously hinder the ability of corporate innovators and scale-up leaders to successfully scale their new venture in an incumbent business.
In this blogpost I highlight how leaders of scale-ups should get ready for and adapt to two major changes in the scaling phase:
Shifting their Business Model focus,
Rethinking the Operating Model.
What you should know about innovation’s time to impact
When leaders turn for help on innovation, the last thing they want to hear is that transformative innovation’s time to impact is unpredictable and long. Still it is important to manage leaders’ expectations early on, if only to give transformative innovation the best chance of success.
Let me explain in this post what I believe all leaders should know about innovation’s time to impact and how to overcome the longer time to impact of transformative innovation.
Books that most influenced my work in 2021
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on strategy and innovation I read in 2021.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
What drives leaders to invest in transformative innovation?
If you plan to introduce or increase the volume on transformative innovation in your organisation, expect pushback to say the least. Still, some leaders manage to overcome all obstacles.
In this article I want to highlight three powerful drivers behind the success of leaders who managed to create a capability for transformative innovation within their organisation.
So what drives leaders to invest in transformative innovation?
Fear of disruption
Hunger for growth
Awareness of an unforeseeable future
You can’t pick the winners at the start, in transformative innovation… and pro basketball!
The hindsight bias leads to overconfidence regarding our ability to predict the outcomes of future events. In the field of innovation, this often causes leaders to invest in the wrong ideas.
In this post I show how leaders who want transformative innovation outcomes should start by acknowledging the hindsight bias, and accept that “they can’t pick the winners at the start”.
Books that most influenced my work in 2020
In this post I reflect on the most useful books on innovation and business transformation I read in 2020.
Below are the four books I referred the most to fellow practitioners, clients and friends.
Innovation Inception: three ideas that unlock innovation in the minds of leaders
In this post I highlight the three fundamental ideas that leaders need to make their own to unleash the transformative innovation potential of their organisations:
1. Exploration is fundamentally different from exploitation,
2. There are different types of innovation: efficiency, sustaining and transformative,
3. To achieve more transformative innovation, you need to bring more volume into your innovation portfolio.