Our Perspectives on New Business Growth, Innovation, & Strategy

AI hasn't repealed the laws of corporate innovation. The classic failure mechanisms, above all RPP misalignment, still apply to AI-enabled innovation, and the remedies for the classic challenges are the same ones that help AI-driven innovation. AI changes the tools, not the discipline.

Whether a new business idea is worth pursuing isn't a gut call or a five-year business plan. Treat it as a testable strategy hypothesis, read it across desirability, feasibility, and viability, and pursue it if you can name the assumptions that would kill it and cheaply test the most dangerous one.

The right metrics for a specific innovation come from the objective it serves and a read across desirability, feasibility, and viability, scaled to stage and class. The common trap is judging early-stage work by core-business financial yardsticks.

BlackBerry didn't lose on hardware or the keyboard. It had the strongest product position in the industry and never turned it into a platform position, while Apple used product differentiation to expand what a smartphone was for and built the platform on top of it. A case study in mistaking a dominant product for a defensible platform, and in measuring the wrong layer.

Radical innovation fails inside mature companies because the organization's antibodies reject anything unlike the core, and they exist for a good reason. The cure isn't willpower, it's custom governance: a deliberately designed operating model at the portfolio and project levels, plus the transition most prescriptions skip.

Innovation creates value in several forms, and financial return is only the most visible. Before measuring an innovation, name which kind of value it's meant to create: financial, strategic, mission, or the innovation capability itself.

CUDA is the clearest current example of a platform whose moat was funded by its own ecosystem. Nvidia built it in the layer Intel and Microsoft weren't defending, and this case study shows why platform dominance rarely transfers from one era to the next.

Radical innovation is hard for mature companies because the very things that make the core business excellent are what a radical venture must violate. The catch-22: the synergies that justify building it inside are what conform it to death. The fix is custom governance.

Measuring innovation is a three-step discipline: clarify the scope you mean (a single project, a portfolio, or the capability to innovate), name its objective, then choose value metrics that fit. Financial return is only the most visible kind of value.

A platform strategy has to succeed as both a product and a platform. Evaluating it means testing an additional layer of platform-specific criteria, treating the decisive ones as pass-or-fail, and making sure your organization can actually carry it.