posts tagged ‘startups’

How To Get From A Great Idea To Actual Innovation

4 April 2012 | Stephen Hoover

[contributed to Fast Company] "There's a tendency for all of us to glorify the ideation process when in fact it's the reduction to practice that's perhaps more important," says Stephen Hoover, CEO of PARC, a Xerox company.

From lean startups to open innovation success

28 July 2011 | Lawrence Lee

A startup is any organization of any size dedicated to creating something new under conditions of uncertainty; the challenge is how to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a path to a successful, sustainable business. I'm not going to restate all of the points in Eric Ries' PARC Forum talk -- you can watch it here -- instead, I want to share how we’ve been practicing similar concepts at PARC and compare and contrast some specific Lean Startup methods with our practices in Open Innovation. One key difference for example is in the strategy of MVP.

Innovating when you don’t know what you don’t know

16 August 2010 | Mark Bernstein

[contributed post to Xconomy] Innovation is everywhere. So then where does differentiation come from? Most directly, competitive advantage comes from creating new business propositions in a disrupted environment. (If compelling enough, a novel offering can itself be the source of disruption.) Startups, especially in Silicon Valley, have been glorified as the vehicles of disruption and creative destruction. Yet… the reality is, when corporations are innovating incrementally, there’s probably not much difference between acquiring a startup, licensing a patent or two from a university, or building a technology with internal R&D. Because in all these cases, the company clearly knows what it wants. The market has signaled what features are desired and getting there is a matter of tactics—identify the right startup, patents, or internal team/expertise. But what happens when the market doesn’t exist yet? Or when it’s too time-consuming and expensive to absorb a startup into your corporate culture—let alone to compete with your competitors to court the targeted startup?