articles 1 to 10 of 163
Can Lean Co-exist with Innovation?
Does lean's structure and discipline snuff out the creative spark that underlies the birth and development of great ideas? In fact, lean brings structure and predictability to innovation, and sharpens the distinction between idea generation and the development process. If a company as innovation-driven as Pixar can apply lean principles to innovation, then others can, too.
From: November 11, 2009
How Entrepreneurs Identify New Business Opportunities
A key question that all would-be entrepreneurs face is finding the business opportunity that is right for them. Should the new startup focus on introducing a new product or service based on an unmet need? Should the venture select an existing product or service from one market and offer it in another where it may not be available? Or should the firm bank on a tried and tested formula that has worked elsewhere, such as a franchise operation? In the first of a series of podcasts for the Wharton-CERT Business Plan Competition, Raffi Amit, a professor of management at Wharton, discusses these questions and more with Knowledge@Wharton. In the process, he offers insights into how entrepreneurs can identify new business opportunities and evaluate their potential and their risks.
From: November 09, 2009
New Approaches to New Markets: How C.K. Prahalad's Bottom of the Pyramid Strategies Are Paying Off
Five years ago, C.K. Prahalad published a book titled, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, in which he argues that multinational companies not only can make money selling to the world's poorest, but also that undertaking such efforts is necessary as a way to close the growing gap between rich and poor countries. Key to his argument for targeting the world's poorest is the sheer size of that market -- an estimated four billion people. How has Prahalad's book -- a revised, fifth-anniversary edition of which has just been published -- affected the behavior of companies and the well-being of consumers in the years since its publication? Knowledge@Wharton checked in with the author for an update, including examples of specific companies that are implementing Bottom of the Pyramid strategies.
From: October 14, 2009
Farhad Mohit: DotSpots and the Wisdom of Crowds
Entrepreneur Farhad Mohit is hardly resting on his laurels, although he could. In 1996, he launched BizRate, a consumer rating site, and then in 2004, Shopzilla, a shopping search engine. His latest venture is DotSpots, a service that lets people update the news in real-time with dots, or distributed objects of thought. These could include mini-blog posts containing text, videos, images, documents, perspectives from the blogosphere or eye-witness accounts from the scene. Mohit talked with Knowledge@Wharton about DotSpots, the publishing industry, the wisdom of crowds, what he learned from his previous successes and the importance of finding the right team, among other topics.
From: August 19, 2009
Education as an Export: Tayeb Kamali on the UAE's Higher Colleges of Technology
What's in a name? Plenty, when you're an entrepreneur starting up a new business, says Tayeb Kamali, who recalls the struggle to convince others in the early days of the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) that the United Arab Emirates' new government-sponsored university needed a name that would be associated with leading-edge education in the Arab region. However, as HCT's Abu Dhabi-based vice chancellor explains in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, that particular challenge was short-lived given the rapid recognition -- in academia and industry -- of the growing importance that the Internet and other technologies have in developing future generations of global business leaders.
From: August 19, 2009
Shai Agassi, Israel's Homegrown Electric Car Pioneer: On the Road to Oil Independence
If there's a poster child for Israel's entrepreneurial spirit, start-up Better Place is one strong candidate. Since launching the company in 2007, Shai Agassi -- a 41-year-old Israeli entrepreneur and former executive of software giant SAP -- has been shaking up the auto industry with his vision for mass adoption of zero-emission vehicles powered by electricity from renewable sources. Starting off with $200 million of seed money, Better Place has since been setting up networks of service stations for electric cars, helping to wean drivers from their environmentally unfriendly gas guzzlers. The timing couldn't be better: Nissan recently unveiled its Leaf electric car whose battery can power the car for up to 100 miles (160km) on a single charge. According to Carlos Ghosn, Nissan's boss, pure electric vehicles could make up 10% of the world's market by 2020. John Paul MacDuffie, a professor of management at Wharton and co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program, joined Knowledge@Wharton to interview Agassi from the company's headquarters in California about what it takes to develop an oil-independent future.
From: August 13, 2009
How Can You Find the Most Promising New Opportunities? Hold an Innovation Tournament
In their new book titled, Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich point out that identifying new opportunities shouldn't be seen as a luxury, but a necessity. They note that creativity and process-driven rigor can go hand in hand when it comes to vetting and managing new ideas. One way to do this, they explain, is by making new ideas compete with one another in numerous rounds of vetting -- that is, by running them through "innovation tournaments" -- so that the strongest and most promising ideas make it to the final round. Rich rewards await companies that make the leap.
From: July 15, 2009
How 'Go/No Go' Thinking Can Stop Innovation Dead in its Tracks
In Unlocking Opportunities for Growth: How to Profit from Uncertainty While Limiting Your Risk, authors Alexander B. van Putten and Ian C. MacMillan offer a tool they call Opportunity Engineering (OE), which shows companies how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities in order to pursue more high-payoff innovations. OE, the authors note, is both a tactical approach and a mindset. It provides a specific way of valuing opportunities, using proprietary software, that enables companies to plug in the parameters of a project and determine its potential quickly. In short, the authors say, OE helps inculcate a culture of innovation.
From: July 15, 2009
Harnessing Networks to Create Value and Identify New Opportunities
As the recent financial crisis has showed so dramatically, networks exist everywhere. Global inter-linkage of loans and mortgages -- which were intended to distribute risk -- actually ended up spreading it far and wide. Similar network-based impacts are at work in fields as diverse as information security and supply chain management. But while networks create new risks, they also generate new opportunities, write Paul R. Kleindorfer, Yoram (Jerry) Wind and Robert E. Gunther in their new book, "The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit and Risk in an Interlinked World." In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Kleindorfer and Wind discuss the themes of many of the 28 essays in their book.
From: July 15, 2009
Eradicating Mud Cookies: Global Executives Try to Connect Profit to Social Good
Thirty-nine executives -- from countries as diverse as Nigeria, India, Russia, South Africa and The Netherlands -- were challenged to devise a profitable business plan to address social ills around the globe. The effort, part of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education's Advanced Management Program, called on participants' expertise in such fields as oil, aerospace, finance, fashion, entertainment and HIV/AIDS education.
From: July 08, 2009
