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Raising the bar on dyslexia treatment |
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On a trip back home to North Carolina, Chad Myers (MBA '04J) met up with a friend and advisor, Sandie Barrie Blackley, and told her he was looking to get back into entrepreneurship. At that stage of his life, some two years ago, Myers was teaching at INSEAD and running the school's International Centre for Entrepreneurship.
Blackley suggested that her work with dyslexia treatment was ripe for technological innovation. "We talked more and learned of our mutual interest in helping people with reading disabilities because we have both have had family members who were struggling readers as children," Myers told Knowledge.
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| In search of an effective innovation policy |
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Everywhere innovation has become a buzzword: in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies. The use of the word has rapidly expanded from a noun to its various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don't only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often the importance of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open-innovation. The innovation jargon has expanded exponentially with colourful analogies ranging from innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, to 'disruptive', 'radical'and 'incremental' innovations.
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| The innovator's DNA |
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A major new study has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. According to Hal Gregersen, an INSEAD professor and co-author of a six-year-long study into disruptive innovation involving some 3,500 executives, there are five ‘discovery’ skills you need but, he says, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’
Some well-known business leaders such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rely on their own particular strengths since innovative entrepreneurs rarely excel at all five discovery skills. For example, Scott Cook of Intuit is strong in observational skills. Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, does a lot of networking, he says. As for Bezos, “experimentation was his forte,” while Jobs is “incredibly strong at associating.”
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| Powering the Google engine: innovation is key |
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It’s a $20 billion company with a formidable staff strength of 20,000, but the spirit of innovation (and enterprise) is alive and well at Google Inc, 11 years after the company was founded by then-students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“One of the things I think is special to innovation at Google ... is that, as much as you can do a lot with Google today, it is just as appealing to the novice, as it is was on day one, and that is something that is difficult for most technology businesses to accomplish,” says Dave Girouard, President, Enterprise of Google, who took part in Global Entrepolis@Singapore, in conjunction with the APEC SME Summit 2009.
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| A practical guide to managing innovation |
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What does innovation mean? It used to relate mainly to products, and that's still important. But over the last decade or so, businesses have been putting more and more emphasis on innovating new services and business models as well. In light of this, it’s time companies take another look at how they manage innovation.
“Innovation is one of the least well-managed areas in most companies,” says David Midgley, a marketing professor at INSEAD and author of The Innovation Manual. Read more.. |
