Management and Strategy

I read this great article on Innovation. Diann Daniel summarizes 7 ways to kill innovation. Following is the summary. You can read the original article here.

1. Believe that innovations will “Just Happen”. You need to champion innovation in your organization it will not just happen.
2. Not having a process to nurture ideas in the organization. Just brain storming is of no use.
3. Lay the success of innovation solely on IT’s shoulders.
4. Create an obstacle course for ideas. The process of managing innovation should be transparent and inclusive.
5. View different and new as bad.
6. Hand over the good ideas to any one department and not have higher level management involvement.
7. Be afraid of failures.

Found a great article on 9 companies that lost 2 Billion dollars. Please read the full article at : http://www.nationalpayday.com/education/news/Tech_Companies_Who_Lost.asp

My comments:

• Webvan: Business model just did not fit the Super market industry.
• Pets.com: Great example where the company just could not clarify its value prop.
• Kozmo.com: Raised 250 million and spend 150mil in advertising with starbucks. What were they thinking?
• Flooz.com: I just think there idea of online currency was just stupid.
• eToys.com: Good ideas are not enough. Understanding your competition is critical too. Competing with Amazon + Toys R Us.. JJ
• Go.com: I think the competition was just too good for them. Yahoo and Google are not easy to compete with.
• Boo.com: This is a great example where Technology is not used to solve business problem but business is used to showcase technology. What were they thinking? Did they sell technology or goods?
• GovWorks.com: Companies are formed by teams and when the core team is lost the company is lost too.
• MVP.com: Just big names mean nothing in business.

Cheers.