Entrepreneurship | INSEAD Knowledge

Marketing

INSEAD Insights: September 2023 Research Picks

Lily Fang

Recent findings on online marketplace dynamics, new market creation, trust in AI, diversity in corporate boards and consumer choices.

Entrepreneurship

How Founding Conditions Impact Start-Up Success

D. C. Motley, C. E. Eesley, W. W. Koo

Diverse founding teams formed in unpredictable environments tend to perform better in similar subsequent conditions.

Career

Pursuing Purpose After Early Retirement

W. Jiang, C. Harbour, A. Tirard

Individuals who achieve financial independence seek greater purpose and meaningful work to enrich their lives.

Career

The Psychological Strategies of Influencers

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Understanding the psychology behind why influencer marketing works.

Entrepreneurship

What All Tech Start-Ups Need to Succeed

T. Evgeniou, L. Van der Heyden, Y. Lechelle

Governance exists to help tech entrepreneurs prevent value destruction from day one.

Entrepreneurship

The Power of Governance for Tech Start-Up Success

T. Evgeniou, L. Van der Heyden, Y. Lechelle

Lessons from a serial entrepreneur on why good governance is crucial for tech start-ups to succeed.

Paper clip leading the way - Photo by Getty/Magnetic-Mcc

Entrepreneurship

Local Innovation as a Driver of Global Development

Prashant Yadav

To achieve critical development goals, we need to champion local, innovative solutions to social problems.

Strategy

Demystifying China’s Internet Giants

Guoli Chen

A behind-the-scenes look at what makes or breaks China’s Big Tech flagbearers and their foreign exploits.

Entrepreneurship

China’s Internet Giants: The Nuts and Bolts of Going Global

G. Chen, J. Li

The lowdown on how ByteDance, Shein and Xiaomi succeeded outside of China while WeChat failed.

Entrepreneurship

Solving Grand Societal Challenges Through Creative Organisation Design

A. Szerb, I. Kivleniece, V. A. Aggarwal

Combining for-profit entrepreneurship with a non-profit social mission through novel organisation design can achieve scale and impact.

Entrepreneurship

Crypto 3.0 Will Be More Human

Jason P. Davis

At a recent INSEAD event, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed technologies to manage online identities, preserve privacy and ensure the responsible use of AI.

Strategy

Will China’s Internet Giants Conquer the World?

G. Chen, J. Li

Dissecting the success and strategies of Chinese internet firms as more of them venture overseas.

Entrepreneurship

Corporate VC Is Booming, but Is It What Your Start-Up Needs?

N. Sauvage, C. Zeisberger, M. Varadan

A guide to choosing the right corporate investment for entrepreneurs.

Career

How to Find Fulfilment by Taking a Step Down

W. Jiang, C. Harbour, A. Tirard

Three stories of professionals who bucked the trend and found greater meaning in their work life.

Leadership & Organisations

Finding Meaning in Life

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Create a compelling self-narrative based on the five pillars that influence the way we experience meaning.

Strategy

Why the Customer Isn’t Always Right

Alixandra Barasch

Consumer behaviour on food-logging tools reveals initial expectations don’t match actual experience.

Entrepreneurship

Venture Capital Crucial to Push for ‘Ethical’ AI and Tech Standards

T. Evgeniou, C. Zeisberger

Venture capitalists’ role as funding source and mentor of tech start-ups makes them uniquely placed to press for more responsible use of technology.

Entrepreneurship

Escaping the Survival Trap

Martin Gargiulo

Why expanding your network is crucial for long-term creative success.

Entrepreneurship

The Start-Up Blind Spot That Trips New Ventures

Phanish Puranam

Having a great business plan is not enough. Start-ups also need good organisation design.

Entrepreneurship

A Foot in the Door: Strategies to Connect With Investors

Balagopal Vissa

Even modestly connected entrepreneurs are six times more likely to succeed in accessing early-stage investors – if they push the right buttons.

Entrepreneurship

What to Do With Contrarians?

H. Piezunka, V. Aggarwal, H. Posen

Even when they are wrong, those who think differently add value to an organisation.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2021

Bruno Lanvin

Tracking innovation around the globe in the face of the Covid-19 crisis.

Entrepreneurship

How Entrepreneurs Solve the Big Fish vs. Big Pond Dilemma

Henning Piezunka

Collaboration with a partner is not strictly a two-way affair; instead, prospective partners take the entire competitive landscape into account when forming ties.

Entrepreneurship

The Hidden Hazards of Smart Device Medical Advice

B. Babic, T. Evgeniou, S. Gerke, G. Cohen

Diagnostic mobile medical apps call for increased regulatory intervention, even if they do not dispense advice or treatment.

Leadership & Organisations

Mixing Business and Pleasure for Competitive Advantage

E. Miron-Spektor, M. Lazar

A recent study shows how entrepreneurial team formation can be improved by combining two established strategies.

Entrepreneurship

How Should Humans Collaborate With AI?

Phanish Puranam

When bringing algorithms and employees together, businesses should respect rather than ignore human preferences.

Entrepreneurship

The New Normal for Innovation

Quy Huy

We’re entering a deglocalised world where firms must ceaselessly innovate in order to survive.

Entrepreneurship

How to Tell the Age of an Innovation

H. Greve, I. Naumovska, V. Gaba

All innovations make the journey from “eureka” to “meh”. But they don’t do so according to fixed rules.

Entrepreneurship

How Silicon Valley Ate Itself – and What Comes Next

A Madhavji, S Hasija, M Grandinetti

The Valley’s pre-eminence isn’t going anywhere, but its special gloss has faded. And that’s a good thing, for both society and the future of innovation.

Entrepreneurship

Who’s Afraid of the Experience Economy?

Benjamin Kessler

Great brand experiences drive better business outcomes, during the pandemic and beyond.

Entrepreneurship

Using Science to Enhance the Customer Experience

Chiara Spina

Hypotheses and experimentation are helping the Saudi government transform the way it serves customs users.

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Entrepreneurship

How the Rural-Urban Divide Plays Out on Digital Platforms

Wesley Wu-Yi Koo

Urban entrepreneurs on digital platforms have access to better offline information, which gives them an edge over rural entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship

Regulating the ‘Wild West’ of Token-Based Business

A Madhavji, M Massa, M Madhavji

Evolving standards of crypto regulation may actually result in sharper oversight than is common in the non-token world.

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Entrepreneurship

Why Firms Should Care About the Career Stage of China’s Officials

X. R. Luo, D. Wang

Tasked with a broad range of objectives, government officials will prioritise different ones depending on their career stage and mobilise firms accordingly.

Entrepreneurship

Is There a Scientific Formula For Start-up Success?

Chiara Spina

Founders make fewer mistakes and pivot in the right direction when they learn to challenge their own assumptions and experiment continuously.

Entrepreneurship

How Start-ups in Emerging Markets Succeed Despite Scarcity

Balagopal Vissa

When the going gets tough, bring on improvisation and learning.

Entrepreneurship

The New Business Models (and Jobs) in Blockchain

From finance to smart cities, distributed ledger technology is beginning to deliver on its vaunted potential in several key sectors.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Frameworks That Work

A recent book narrates a variety of productive and powerful paths forward for all kinds of entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship

Illogical Truths: The Paradoxes of Silicon Valley

Gopi Rangan & James So

The Valley’s most valuable product is the contrarian thinking that fuels its innovation culture.

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Entrepreneurship

Big Tech’s Global Strategy in the Cloud

Jason P. Davis

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are fighting tooth and nail in the cloud market, using strategies heavily influenced by their respective histories.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2020

Bruno Lanvin

Who will finance innovation beyond Covid-19?

Entrepreneurship

Reconceiving Innovation for Covid-19

Manuel Sosa

Covid-19 is an opportunity for businesses to build a new normal that is more human-centric, imaginative and agile.

Entrepreneurship

The Central Conundrum of Covid-19 Entrepreneurship

Vikas A. Aggarwal

A recently released report reveals how one entrepreneurial ecosystem is responding to the pandemic.

Entrepreneurship

The Innovator’s Imitation Dilemma: TikTok and Facebook in Context

J. Davis, V. Aggarwal

Even with a backer like Microsoft, innovators must outrace copycats like Facebook and others who share the spoils of imitation among themselves.

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Entrepreneurship

The State of AI-Driven Digital Transformation

Joerg Niessing & Marcus Ho

With a holistic transformation strategy, AI can create wonders.

Entrepreneurship

How Consumer Nudging Can Solve the Plastic Packaging Waste Crisis

M. Peshkam, D. Dubois

Until there is a major change in consumers’ behaviour towards plastic packaging waste, the widespread and tangible shifts the situation calls for are unlikely.

Entrepreneurship

The Secret to Successful Crowdsourcing Contests? More Prizes

Your prize money goes further when it’s distributed among a larger group of winners.

Entrepreneurship

The Six Roles You Need on Your AI Team

Can you build new technological capacities during a global crisis? Yes – if you make the right decisions regarding your people.

Entrepreneurship

The Apps That Brought China Back to Life

Ruby Mu & Xiao Zhixing

The nation where COVID-19 began is carefully returning to normal, thanks to controversial technologies that may put safety before privacy.

Entrepreneurship

Safeguarding Privacy in a Pandemic

Andrea Canidio

Speeding up the adoption of blockchain and other digitised ledger technologies (DLT) can help society reconcile security and privacy.

Entrepreneurship

Big Tech Is Rewiring Healthcare in the Platform Revolution

The healthcare industry will consolidate around a small number of platforms.

Entrepreneurship

Speed, Power and Flow: Use Surf Criteria to Rate Start-ups

Rony Stefano & Horacio Falcão

A novel method to predict start-up success.

Entrepreneurship

How Leaders Should Navigate Long-Term Uncertainty

Quy Huy

Entrepreneurs and change managers may ultimately be selling a dream, but that’s not what stakeholders are buying.

Entrepreneurship

Disruption and Anti-disruption in the Streaming Economy

N. Askin, B. Kessler, A. Batey

For established industry players in entertainment and elsewhere, the ascent of blockchain is a double-edged sword.

Leadership & Organisations

Start-ups: The Founding Team Is a Real Magic Bullet

M. Lazar, E. Miron-Spektor

Studies show that the entrepreneurial team may impact a start-up’s long-term success more than its product.

Entrepreneurship

Seven Behaviours for Boosting Change Readiness

Resistance to change is baked into our biology, but the ability to overcome it can be strengthened with the right regimen.

Entrepreneurship

Blockchain: Finding the Value Proposition

Peter Zemsky

Open-sourced collaborative projects like Hyperledger are helping companies find the value of blockchain technology.

Entrepreneurship

A Start-up’s Evolution from AI Lab to AI Business

Pavel Kireyev

For Preferred Networks, building tech for self-driving cars and smart factories is the daily routine. One of its biggest opportunities is to devise a business model that complements its technology.

Entrepreneurship

Are Venture Capitalists Hopelessly Biased, or Deceptively Rational?

Bala Vissa & Kim Claes

Close scrutiny of VC deal terms in India reveals a nuanced pattern of objectivity and discrimination.

Entrepreneurship

‘Pink Silos’ in Start-up Funding and How to Avoid Them

Isabelle Solal

Female entrepreneurs and female investors risk being boxed in if they seek only each other’s company.

Entrepreneurship

SCALE: A Growth Toolkit for Mature Market Start-Ups

How a new programme increased start-ups’ chance of success.

Entrepreneurship

Social Media Strategy for David and Goliath

Jamie Seoyeon Song & Martin Gargiulo

When leveraging online influence, the identity of your audience should dictate how you engage with them.

Entrepreneurship

Why New Ventures Should Think Twice Before Building Political Connections

Xiaowei Rose Luo

In emerging markets, B2B start-ups’ closeness to local government can scare away potential customers.

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Entrepreneurship

Meet the Algorithms Planning Your Next Online Purchase

Pavel Kireyev

AI and machine learning are changing global consumption habits, and companies are playing catch-up.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2019

R.Noyes, B. Lanvin

Continuing innovations in health and medicine have led to economic growth and a better quality of life for many around the world. But inequalities could grow rapidly.

Entrepreneurship

How Blockchain Can Win the War Against Plastic Waste

M. Peshkam. D. Dubois

Start-ups are making incremental use of blockchain to reduce plastic waste, but the technology’s power to drive real change is yet to be realised.

Entrepreneurship

Y Combinator Accelerates the Hunt for Unicorns

Faced with increasing competition, the leading accelerator is making start-up know-how widely available as it searches for the next Airbnb.

Entrepreneurship

Oiling the Wheels of Change in Traditional Business: The Marico Story

Vinika D. Rao

How a traditional family business built on spice became a multinational giant of consumer goods.

Entrepreneurship

The TikTok Strategy: Using AI Platforms to Take Over the World

A curious combination of prediction technology and human censors enables ByteDance to create a dynamic global video ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship

A Three-Part Formula for Fueling Start-Ups

Securing the necessary resources involves much more than just getting a VC to say yes.

Strategy

Global Open Innovation in the Silicon Valley of Sport

L. Felipe Monteiro

One of the world’s biggest football clubs has set out a pioneering collaborative strategy of innovation.

Entrepreneurship

Five Lessons from a VC with a Long-Term Focus

INSEAD alum Oren Zeev’s people-based philosophy of investing is one of the secrets of his remarkable success.

Entrepreneurship

Women Are Risk-Takers, Too: Busting Gender Myths in the Start-up Space

C. Lin, D. Gurcu

A tissue of stereotypes and pseudo-science forms the “rational” basis for gender bias in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship

The Multinational Fuelled by Thousands of Entrepreneurs

Felipe Monteiro

Haier’s business model has created a worldwide entrepreneurship movement.

Entrepreneurship

In Crowdsourcing, You Have to Know How to Say “No Thanks”

Henning Piezunka & Linus Dahlander

Rejection can actually strengthen relationships between companies and the crowd.

Entrepreneurship

How Alibaba Uses Blockchain to Compete in the Cloud

Jason P. Davis

Foreign companies can use emerging tech to build a reputation as a strategic partner in solving local problems.

Entrepreneurship

The Four Most Prevalent Myths About Electric Cars

Boris Liedtke, Stefan Krause

Breaking down the myths that hinder acceptance of electric vehicles.

Entrepreneurship

Two Characteristics of Digital World Conquerors

Why some digital businesses easily take the world by storm, and others get lost in translation.

Entrepreneurship

The Real Story Behind Uber’s Exit from Southeast Asia

Uber, Grab and Go-Jek embody emerging strategies in international platform competition.

Entrepreneurship

The Rise of the Red Unicorn

Ian Potter & Claudia Zeisberger

China is on track to absorb more venture capital than the U.S. this year.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2018

Solving the energy/environment equation requires a significant innovation push.

Entrepreneurship

Life in Start-up Nation: Two Young French Entrepreneurs Speak Out

James Costantini & Dawn Jarisch

In a frantic-paced start-up scene, the primary challenge is building and managing talented teams.

Entrepreneurship

Neuroscience-Based Product Innovation: Hype or Hope?

H. Plassmann, A. Ling

AI and Big Data allow innovators to leverage neuroscientific knowledge at scale to untapped markets.

Entrepreneurship

ZhongAn’s Micropremium Model: The Future of Insurance?

K. Cool, C. Angoulvant, B. Rogers

With scale, Chinese online insurer ZhongAn has created a market where there was none before.

Entrepreneurship

Data Security for the Internet of Things

Machine-to-machine transactions entail risks as well as an opportunity to create a digital blue ocean.

Entrepreneurship

The Journey of the Activist-Entrepreneur

M. Lee, T. Ramus, A. Vaccaro

A group of Sicilian anti-Mafia activists-turned-entrepreneurs encountered tensions between the demands of the market and the values of their social movement.

Entrepreneurship

Digital Lessons from Go-Jek, Indonesia’s Answer to Uber and Grab

What can be learnt from the meteoric rise of Indonesia’s ride-hailing and logistics platform.

Entrepreneurship

Having a Social Mission Benefits Women Entrepreneurs

Matthew Lee & Laura Huang

Highlighting a venture’s social impact can help female entrepreneurs overcome gender bias.

Entrepreneurship

Disrupting the Car Insurance Industry

B. Rogers, K. Cool, C. Angoulvant

The London-based start-up Cuvva competes with incumbents by making it easy for drivers to buy pay-as-you-go insurance.

Entrepreneurship

Do Digital Platforms Empower or Exploit Workers?

A five-factor checklist may provide answers on a case-by-case basis.

Entrepreneurship

How Founders Kill Their Own Start-Ups

While micro-management has never done a firm any good, it’s lethal in start-ups.

Entrepreneurship

From “Barbarians” to Skilled Industrialists

Private equity has evolved and is attracting increasing interest.

Entrepreneurship

Why Many Women Social Entrepreneurs Avoid Commercial Models

M. Lee, S. Dimitriadis, L. Ramarajan, J. Battilana

The presence of women business owners in a community encourages female social entrepreneurs to pursue hybrid ventures.

Entrepreneurship

Having a Social Mission Benefits Women Entrepreneurs

Matthew Lee & Laura Huang

Highlighting a venture’s social impact can help female entrepreneurs overcome the discriminatory effects of gender bias.

Entrepreneurship

Competition in the Age of Amazon

Henrich Greve & Seo Yeon Song

Amazon’s dominance is changing the power structure of publishing – a pattern that may be borne out in several other industries.

Entrepreneurship

Insurtech Is Hitting Critical Mass

C. Angoulvant, K.Cool, B. Rogers

The wisest insurance incumbents will seize the collaborative opportunities springing from this new environment.

Entrepreneurship

Ecosystems Are the Future of Insurance

The coming shift to insurer ecosystems presents a vast opportunity for value creation.

Entrepreneurship

Will Late-Stage Venture Funding Pay Off?

It is uncertain whether private investors will capture the value they expect from tech unicorns.

Entrepreneurship

Looking for the Right Co-Founders

Character is just as important as capability. Conviction will come later.

Entrepreneurship

Digital Businesses: The Metrics That Really Matter

User-centric firms should identify and track the core actions that can make or break their businesses.

Entrepreneurship

The Double-Edged Sword of Being a Lean Start-up

Experimentation is vital in early-stage start-ups, but it involves a set of trade-offs that can influence a firm’s ability to adapt to future technological change.

Entrepreneurship

From Inequality to Immortality

Pushan Dutt

A burgeoning industry promises to help the wealthy defeat the ultimate equaliser: Death.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2017

Innovation in agriculture is vital. One key to feeding the world is releasing pressure on the use of scarce natural resources through innovation.

Entrepreneurship

How Digital Platforms Increase Inequality

Digital platforms should combat their natural tendency to arbitrarily favour certain users.

Entrepreneurship

The Dangers of Platform Monopolies

Predatory business development practices could cause risks for the platform ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship

A Pathway to Scale in Emerging Markets

Ridhima Aggarwal

Achieving both growth and broad-based consumer access hinges on funding and operations choices.

Entrepreneurship

Why Do So Many Corporate VCs Die Young?

Specific staffing choices and high investment levels can prolong the lifespan of corporate venture capital units.

Entrepreneurship

A Future for the News Industry

Mark Hunter, Luk Van Wassenhove & Maria Besiou

The decline of the news business is not inevitable, if we connect to our best customers.

Entrepreneurship

Imagining a Leaner, Meaner University

If we had to redesign higher education from scratch, what would it look like?

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs Must Balance Specialisation With General Knowledge

Entrepreneurial legitimacy rests on having general and functional knowledge of an industry.

Entrepreneurship

The Innovative Flair Arab Inventors Bring to America

S. Mahroum, G. Zahradnik & B. Dachs

Our research shows the impact Arab and Middle Eastern inventors have had on innovation in the U.S.

Entrepreneurship

Tackling the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

Sarah Kaplan

The right combination of message and methods would help level the playing field.

Entrepreneurship

Hidden Neural Patterns Could Be Limiting Your Performance

Vip Vyas & Stuart Doughty

Our memories and experiences obscure potential value in our midst.

Entrepreneurship

The Four Essential Pillars of Successful Platform Businesses

To transition from pipeline to ecosystem business requires executive focus and strength building in four key areas.

Entrepreneurship

Seven Attributes of the Most Innovative Cultures

The roots of innovation lie in the most basic cultural values.

Entrepreneurship

Three Make-or-Break Factors for Tomorrow’s Start-ups

The skillset necessary for entrepreneurial success is changing rapidly.

Entrepreneurship

When Internal Networking Undermines Innovation

Formal and informal communication networks often corrupt rather than complement one another.

Entrepreneurship

Three Essential Elements of Customer Co-Creation

The success of customer-driven innovation depends on who’s invited to participate.

Entrepreneurship

Equity Investment as an Innovation Tool

Jinpian Diao-Piezunka & John Felitti

Corporate venture capital can offer a strategic boost to firms that maintain pipelines of innovative products.

Entrepreneurship

How Collective Learning Improves Innovation

Jaemin Lee & Jason Davis

App developers listen to their customers and competitors to learn how to succeed.

Entrepreneurship

Finding Your Space on the Entrepreneurial Map

When pushing ideas forward into the unknown make sure you know where you are playing.

Entrepreneurship

Longer, Better Lives in the Sharing Economy

Ninie Wang

Technology can turn the burden of long-term care into a new growth engine.

Entrepreneurship

Making Money Out of a Platform Business

Sangeet Paul Choudary, Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne

Creating network effects alone is not sufficient to monetise a platform business.

Entrepreneurship

Beware of Capitalising on Fear

Jeeva Somasundaram

Demand for direct-to-consumer genetic and medical testing is largely based on unfounded anxieties.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2016

Innovation is essential for sustainable growth. Countries should maintain their R&D investments and cooperate internationally to protect their innovation momentum in the face of low-growth scenarios.

Entrepreneurship

Eight Ways to Launch a Successful Platform Business

Sangeet Paul Choudary, Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne

Platform businesses inevitably face a “chicken-or-egg” start when connecting two sides of a market. There are eight ways to get around it.

Entrepreneurship

Forecasting the Success of Innovations

Creators beat managers at predicting an innovation’s success, unless they’re predicting the success of their own work.

Entrepreneurship

Brazil’s X Factor

Building business groups too quickly can end in catastrophe.

Entrepreneurship

The Science Behind Great Product Design

Companies that produce highly user-friendly and innovative products are those that know how to mix functionality with design.

Entrepreneurship

How to Build a Successful Platform Business

Sangeet Paul Choudary, Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne

Companies that successfully construct networked market places that attract participation and create value for participants, follow three core principles.

Entrepreneurship

What’s the Story of Your Start-up?

Great stories and great start-ups share similar principles.

Sami Mahroum MENA nedds to recognise the potential of start-ups

Entrepreneurship

Start-Ups: Growth Engines of the Middle East

Despite the Middle East’s pervasive aversion to risk and tribal business culture, online start–ups are injecting energy into local markets.

Strategy

How Successful Start-up Teams Allocate Roles

The financial success of a new venture depends heavily on who does what within the founding team. The most successful start-ups allocate positions based on prior work experience as well as how co-founders fit into the social context around them.

Entrepreneurship

China: Forging a New Path to Global Innovation

Y. Doz, K. Wilson

The size and nature of the Chinese domestic market and the rapid pace of the country’s internationalisation are pushing Chinese firms on a very different trajectory to globalised innovation.

Entrepreneurship

Learning the Moves of Successful Startups

In the contest for competitive advantage, start-ups should use a very different playbook from their larger rivals.

Entrepreneurship

Design-Led Innovation in the Public Sector

Concierges, cuddly toys and a chilled-out vibe: Welcome to the innovation-driven government agency.

Entrepreneurship

How Lunatics, Experts and Connectors Help Drive Innovation

Hackers and hipsters may be behind the innovative success of today’s startups, but established companies require a different skillset.

Entrepreneurship

How to Spot a Game Changer

Four essential questions for predicting whether an invention will really change our lives.

Family Business

Entrepreneurship Lessons from a Family Venture Philanthropist

Venture capital, philanthropy and family business are not mutually exclusive concepts. They all reflect the same entrepreneurial values of long-term investment, personal commitment, building teams and thinking outside the box.

Search funds giving entrepreneurs a greater chance of success

Entrepreneurship

Help for Entrepreneurs Who Want to Buy a Business

Search funds assist entrepreneurs with finding and acquiring companies rather than starting their own, but the model is fraught with high failure rates. Combining search funds with the methods of startup accelerators could be a way to increase their success rates.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries, 2015

Innovation-led growth is no longer the prerogative of high-income countries alone. Middle-income countries are catching up fast, but they still need some crucial ingredients to compete.

Gaining a competitive advantage in the technology marketplace through strategic partnerships.

Entrepreneurship

Who Are Apple’s New Competitors?

The Apple-Cisco partnership promises to transform the workplace; It may forge a whole new marketplace along the way.

Entrepreneurship

A Chinese Billionaire’s Instruction Manual for Innovation

Quy Huy, Yidi Guo

Ironically, a rulebook for innovation could be the best approach for shaking up rigid organisational culture.

Entrepreneurship

Innovation: Not a Straight Arrow

Great innovators don’t necessarily follow straight paths. Often a winding path can shape their defining inventions.

Entrepreneurship

Crowdsourcing Is Not a Numbers Game

It may seem counterintuitive, but too much participation can ruin your crowdsourcing efforts. Focus on careful curation rather than a cattle call.

Entrepreneurship

How Important Is Education to Entrepreneurial Development?

Business students can be taught how to negotiate with lawyers, pitch to investors and create a business plan, but can you teach someone to think like an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship

Design, Business & Brand: How Creativity Becomes Innovation

What once were considered innovative capabilities are becoming core business skills.

Entrepreneurship

What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Authors

Authors, like entrepreneurs, agonise about making their work a big success. But “best-seller obsession” can take them down the wrong path.

Entrepreneurship

Empowering Patients with Chronic Disease Self-Management

Kyle J. Rose

Managing chronic diseases can be an exhausting and, at times, demoralising experience. Combining personalised software and connected devices can ease the burden and provide motivation.

Entrepreneurship

Elon Musk, Frugal Engineer

Tesla’s game-changing batteries for the home are a page straight out of India’s frugal engineering playbook.

Entrepreneurship

The Most Important Questions Entrepreneurs Should Ask Themselves

Before starting a business, there are four characteristics an entrepreneur should have, or look for in their partners.

Entrepreneurship

Innovation Brings Out the Human in Us

New technologies have made face-to-face communication and local relationships more important, not less.

Entrepreneurship

An Innovation Reinvention for Incumbents

Established firms do not have to develop innovative capabilities entirely from scratch. By following a path blazed by designers, they can develop homegrown innovation processes and a culture of creative thinking.

Entrepreneurship

Capitalism: Making Altruism Sustainable

Those with a genuine interest in helping the poor can apply capitalist principles to understand the needs of the market and provide it with what it needs.

Entrepreneurship

A Bridge for the Knowledge Gap

An innovative content platform is starting to put the world’s most advanced agricultural data into the hands of its poorest farmers.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Tech-Ready Countries 2015

Those able to harness the power of information and communication technology are reaping ever more benefits. But in poor countries, digital poverty is holding back growth and development, leaving them further behind.

Entrepreneurship

The Innovative Organisation: Learning From Design Firms

The world’s top design firms have innovation down to almost a science. For traditional incumbents looking to build innovative capabilities, design can be the ideal catalyst.

Entrepreneurship

iWatching Every Step You Take

All-seeing, all-knowing smartwatches that connect the information dots of our lives reflect the many alliances firms like Apple have to manage to innovate.

Responsibility

How the Lean Startup Approach Can Alleviate Poverty

Experimenting before plunging into major investments can pay off in the long run.

Entrepreneurship

The ‘Omni-Channel Approach’ – Digital Banking for Generation Y

Banks must be prepared for serious disruption that has already begun.

Entrepreneurship

Inject Novelty into Your Innovations

Making sure customers are familiar with your products is essential, but so is a strong dose of occasional novelty.

Entrepreneurship

Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds for Good

How non-profit crowdsourcing could provide a competitive advantage for solving a tough global problem.

Entrepreneurship

Start-up Innovation: Who Else Shares Your Partner’s Bed?

Strategic partnerships can be essential to a start-up’s innovation output. But are your partner’s other alliances affecting the value you get out of the relationship?

Entrepreneurship

Finding Co-Founders to Build Your Company

Just as few would consider a marriage based on convenience, it should not be the driving factor behind building a founding team. But the rules of dating do apply when finding your business partners.

Entrepreneurship

Geolocation is Changing the Retail Business Model Yet Again

And maybe that’s why Amazon is moving into bricks-and-mortar.

Entrepreneurship

Your Smartphone Is the New Bank Branch

The future of banking is, quite literally, in the hands of customers, on phones and tablets. The last to realise this are the ones with the most to lose or gain: the banks themselves.

Entrepreneurship

Breaking an Alliance to Take the Lead

Toyota appears to have broken an unwritten agreement among automakers, but it has done so before and won.

Entrepreneurship

Patrick Turner: Entrepreneurs’ Mentor

Patrick Turner, an inspiration to thousands of budding entrepreneurs, with an inimitable teaching style blending theatricality with hard-nosed business sense, died on September 12th, aged 66.

Entrepreneurship

How to Market a Revolution

Every so often, an innovative product fails to achieve widespread adoption because companies don’t connect the dots for consumers.

Entrepreneurship

Keeping Secrets Holds Back Innovation

When it comes to collaborating on something new, secrecy and tension can ruin a beautiful partnership.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries 2014

The global leaders in innovation have made it easy for people, not just business, to thrive.

Entrepreneurship

Network Advantage through complementarity

Alliances can yield complementary innovations.

Entrepreneurship

Four Questions to Revolutionise Your Business Model

Innovation is about more than groundbreaking technology. Rigorous, systematic questioning of risks in your business model can unleash opportunities for game changing performance improvements.

Entrepreneurship

Organising for Innovation: Old Ideas about New Ideas

Good organisation design can help companies become more innovative, but first you have to understand the nature of “new ideas” and how to generate them.

Entrepreneurship

Market Entry: Where to Start-Up?

Even highly-targeted niche start-ups need to think about their focus. What factors should you consider when positioning your company?

Entrepreneurship

Innovation Through Acquisition

Google’s acquisition of Skybox is a good example of complementary innovation.

Entrepreneurship

Five Steps to Success in Emerging Markets

As the global market faces a massive geo-economic realignment, multinationals are having to rethink every aspect of the way they do business.

Entrepreneurship

How Shared Interests Can Break Mergers

When firms have common clients and shared interests they are often tempted to merge. But a bigger entity can scare off clients and create overlap.

Entrepreneurship

The Five Cs of Locating a Start-Up

Why start your internet company in California? “Black swan” start-ups have cut paths beyond the hi-tech heartlands.

Entrepreneurship

Don’t Dismiss Social Media’s Impact on TV Ratings Yet

NBCUniversal says social media is “not yet a game changer” in influencing television viewing. But its impact is far from insignificant.

Entrepreneurship

Unlikely, But Necessary Alliances

Alliances with competitors are sometimes necessary for long-term competitiveness.

Entrepreneurship

The World's Most Tech-Ready Countries 2014

The latest Global Information Technology Report demonstrates that infrastructure is only half of the battle in creating a networked nation.

Entrepreneurship

Your Big Data Action Plan

With the magnitude of data available and our growing capability to process it, big data has become an asset class that has spawned an entire industry. How should you be positioned to take advantage of it?

Entrepreneurship

From Start-Up to Scaling Up

Contrary to popular belief, it’s much harder to build scale in a business than to start one.

Entrepreneurship

Should We Ditch the “Green Economy”?

Faced with public pressure to lower their carbon footprint, and the high cost of setting up sustainable energy supplies, businesses and governments now have a third option.

Entrepreneurship

Overseas Subsidiaries Land Where Countrymen Are Present

Europe is hungry for Chinese investment. But where Chinese firms choose to establish their subsidiaries will depend on where their migrants are.

Entrepreneurship

The Thin Red Line of Success

When competing in an innovative new market the benefits of an early lead can’t be over-estimated.

Entrepreneurship

Car Dealerships Are a Bad Deal for Customers

The car dealership model no longer provides the value it once did. Letting market forces prevail is what’s best for customers.

Entrepreneurship

Unlocking the Secrets of Entrepreneurial Innovation: How to Create a Killer App

Entrepreneurs in mobile ecosystems are learning how to create killer applications that can disrupt resource rich, entrenched players.

Entrepreneurship

What’s Facebook up to?

Facebook could have purchased Sony for the price it paid for WhatsApp, but the benefits of the acquisition justify the price tag.

Entrepreneurship

The New Formula for Creating a Billion-Dollar Firm

Companies with a software ecosystem for their hardware to live in will be the next winners in the technology sector.

Entrepreneurship

No Strings Attached: Creating the Optimum Environment for Innovation

A change of approach to loosely-linked research partners can generate radically new products.

Entrepreneurship

Can Your Alliance Network Lift a Stealth Bomber Off the Ground?

Why the first stealth bomber never took off, but the second one did.

Entrepreneurship

When is the Right Time to Start a Business?

Every aspiring entrepreneur seeks an answer to this million dollar question, but the answer lies within

Entrepreneurship

Innovate More by Doing Less

Henrich Greve

R&D departments could be better utilised to look for alliances that may provide robust innovations

Entrepreneurship

Cyclical Approaches to Innovative Collaborations

For highly innovative group collaborations, do what the big tech firms do: Cycle through collaborations with different pairs and take the long view.

Entrepreneurship

Will the Cable Bundle Survive?

Recent talk of the decline of the cable television industry may be premature.

Entrepreneurship

How Much Misery Does It Take to Innovate?

High-tech, opportunity-driven innovation gets the headlines, but this is only one part of innovation as we know it.

Entrepreneurship

What Good is a Glue That Doesn’t Stick?

Is your company positioned to turn a failure into a billion-dollar success?

Entrepreneurship

When Innovation Stalls

Chinese battery and car maker BYD changed the game with process improvements that enabled agility in a rapidly growing environment, but new capabilities are needed to take it further.

Entrepreneurship

Ceaseless Innovation

Amazon’s latest reinvention demonstrates its ability to constantly challenge its business model.

Entrepreneurship

Globalising Entrepreneurship Palo Alto-Style

Silicon Valley can’t save the world, but a federated model with a rich toolkit can.

Entrepreneurship

Show Appreciation to Your Network

Showing your appreciation costs nothing and it can yield much more than not doing so.

Entrepreneurship

Hollywood Innovation Overtakes Piracy

Movie industry innovation is more than keeping pace with revenue drains caused by piracy.

Entrepreneurship

INSEAD's Global Thought Leaders: Hal Gregersen

INSEAD Professor of Leadership Hal Gregersen, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2013 "Innovation Award", explains what sets disruptive leaders apart from the pack.

Entrepreneurship

The Future of Media Is (Also) About Its Institutions

The media titans of today will play a decisive role in shaping the digital future.

Entrepreneurship

Customer-Driven Innovation

Commitment to customer integration highlights management trends at this year’s Industrial Excellence Awards in Leipzig.

Entrepreneurship

Why Large Companies Struggle With Business Model Innovation

Innovation success stories are all strikingly similar: a bright idea, supported by a zealot-innovator who sees it through. The windfall of goodies follows. But failures happen for all sorts of reasons, and they often occur even when the idea is sound.

Entrepreneurship

Samsung Beats Blackberry in the Global Alliance Game

Andrew Shipilov

To the investors of Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry, the recent years have been really disappointing. It lost the fight to Apple and Samsung. There may be several explanations to this failure, but one which particularly stands out is the failure of RIM to build a strong alliance network. Alliances and partnerships are the sources of “network advantage”–the ability to improve operating efficiency and increase product innovation by combining resources and knowledge with partners.

Economics & Finance

How to Make Your Company More Creative? Hire a Senior Executive Who Worked Abroad

Andrew Shipilov

Creativity is an important driver of competitive advantage for companies. One way your company can be more creative is to hire executives who worked abroad. These people are likely to offer non traditional solutions to your problems.

Entrepreneurship

BlackBerry as Niche: Firm Disappointment and Strategy Change

Henrich Greve

BlackBerry director Bert Nordberg was elected recently, but is not shy about making statements: he has already said publicly that the BlackBerry smartphones need to retreat to certain niches in the market, leaving others for the competitors. This may seem reasonable to many listeners given how BlackBerry has suffered from competition by Samsung, Apple, and other firms, but it is probably not a popular view in BlackBerry, where employees remember their earlier great times.

Entrepreneurship

The World's Most Innovative Companies 2013

The world’s most innovative companies enjoy a premium on their share price. Holding onto it depends on the flexibility of top-level management to encourage new ideas across the organisation.

Leadership & Organisations

Use Catalytic Questioning to Solve Significant Problems

For almost twenty years, I have refined a systematic approach to uncovering the right questions—those that start to unlock entirely different solutions and perspectives—with hundreds of teams around the world, from the C-suite to the shop floor.

Entrepreneurship

Busting Innovation Myths

Sitting under an apple tree may have played a part in Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation but it takes more than an epiphany to innovate.

Entrepreneurship

In-Store Cameras: From Security Aids to Sales Tools

Data from loyalty cards, store transactions and social media is helping bricks and mortar retailers understand the who, what and when of sales, but when it comes to what’s happening inside the store, information is pretty thin on the ground. Until in-store cameras came along.

Entrepreneurship

Multicultural Experiences: Making the World Creative, Innovative...and Flat!

We can talk with someone halfway around the globe as easily as with someone in the next office; sell our products in places we couldn’t spell two years ago, take a job in India as easily as in Indiana. What, however, does all of this have to do with our ability to live productive careers and satisfying lives?

Entrepreneurship

Who Are Today's Citizens of the World?

They are young, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-national. Meet the “Global Cosmopolitans".

Entrepreneurship

Murder by Structure: When Social Networks Kill

I just saw NBA star Derrick Rose give thoughtful responses to a CNN interviewer asking about the murder spree that is currently hitting Chicago: 506 murders in 2012, of which around 400 were thought to be gang related. Rose, who is from Chicago and knows the neighbourhoods hit by gun violence and murders, put the blame on poverty, as well as the increasing gap between the poverty that many experience and the lifestyle and success they see others have.

Entrepreneurship

At Last, a New Business Model for Tesla

Two weeks back, Tesla Motors, the company behind the Tesla Model S, arguably the most promising all-electric challenger to the century-long domination of fossil-fuel cars, announced an innovative switching station based infrastructure that would bring its flagship product one step closer to being the first all-electric no-compromises luxury sedan.

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Countries: The Global Innovation Index 2013

INSEAD-WIPO-Cornell University rank 142 countries on their innovation capabilities. Sixth annual index reshuffles the top ten and shows gap widening between rich and poor countries.

Strategy

Social Media in B2B Marketing: Publish or Perish!

Social Media can be an important part of B2B strategy. But to make an impact within the content ecosystem, you have to have a message and move fast.

Entrepreneurship

Jugaad Cars: Carlos Ghosn and Disruptive Innovation

Would you like to have a Renault or a Nissan (well, Datsun brand) for less than USD 5,000? Soon you can, if you live in India. These cars are part of a bold initiative by Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn to harness frugal engineering, a set of practices intended to launch new models with radically lower development and production costs than has been done before.

Entrepreneurship

The Power of the Crowd

Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, is not listening to his focus group. The thing about focus groups is that you don’t (always) get to choose them. The web gives a voice to special interest groups and brings sites which rate value like Trip Advisor, Mumsnet, IWantGreatCare to life.

Entrepreneurship

A.G. Lafley’s Innovation Skills Will Weather P&G’s Storm

Almost 20 years ago, I interviewed Procter & Gamble (PG) Chief Executive Officer A.G. Lafley at company headquarters in Cincinnati for a book project focused on what it takes to become a great global leader. I was looking forward to talking with Lafley because former Chairman John Pepper had endorsed him as one of the most effective global leaders at P&G.

Leadership & Organisations

Assembling A Creative Team

A shared history of creative interactions can be the key to unleash innovation.

Economics & Finance

Building Skyscrapers in the Sand

Despite a minor real estate set-back a few years ago, Dubai is back – building structures most people only dream about. But how long can this last?

Economics & Finance

Cities of the Future

L. Van Wassenhove, C. Howells

Globalisation has meant urbanisation, and by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. What should we do to survive and thrive in this brave new world?

Entrepreneurship

Networks of Giving: How Corporations Choose to Give

If this year is like last year, people in various places can soon watch Citigroup bankers clean beaches, prepare summer camps for children from poor households, and distribute food to the hungry. They participate in what Citigroup calls Global Community Day, a “Day of Service” done by many large corporations. I can imagine various reactions to bankers picking garbage and operate soup kitchens, but as a management scholar I think “Nice, but could they also do something that uses their expertise?” In all fairness, they do, in the form of teaching financial literacy to people in need.

Entrepreneurship

A Business Model for Bangladesh

Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh in April, which caused the deaths of over 1,000 people, many commentators pointed to the absence of building codes, lack of workplace safety rules, and the greed of corporations. But there are business model solutions that can improve supply chain compliance.

Entrepreneurship

Missiles and Violins: Why Knowledge Management Strengthens the Case for Disarmament

When North Korea threatens to attack South Korea or fires missiles into the sea, the press reports are typically accompanied by pictures of military parades like the one below. I am wondering if I am the only one struck by the contrast between the missile pointing skyward and the decrepit truck underneath. Once again it is clear that North Korea only spends money on what its leadership cares about, so the best they have of trucks (and trucks can be used to carry food and other useful tasks) is far inferior to their missiles.

Entrepreneurship

Closing the Digital Divide: Connectivity is Just the start

It’s no longer about having the link or the hardware or the infrastructure. It’s about what you do with it all

Entrepreneurship

INSEAD Knowledge Wins Interactive Media Award

INSEAD Knowledge has won a Best in Class award in the prestigious Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition, the highest honour bestowed by the organisation. The site achieved a total of 489 out of a possible 500 points in the judging criteria for design, feature functionality, usability, standards compliance and cross-browser capability, with the highest possible mark going to content at 100.

Entrepreneurship

Outsourcing and Management Consulting: When do Firms do What?

I just did a search on keyword “consulting” and found that two of the top articles that appeared were on the problems that the large Indian outsourcing firms were having in getting enough visas for their employees to work in the US, and McKinsey’s attempts to get female workers who left the company to return.

Entrepreneurship

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apollo 11. He’s Still Innovating

On July 16, 1969 at 9:32 a.m. EST, five F-1 engines lifted the 6.2 million-pound Saturn V rocket into space. (As a reference point, that’s the equivalent of tossing about 400 full-grown elephants into the air at once.) Jeff Bezos, who was 5 years old at the time, was watching—intently. Four days later, on July 20, 1969 at 4:18 p.m. EST, the young Bezos was mesmerized by the words “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” when the lunar module gently set three men onto the moon.

Entrepreneurship

Liberate Your Employees and Recharge your Business Model

As we discussed in our recent blog post on HBR Blogging Network, it finally seems that the uproar overMarissa Meyer’s diktat banning flexible work policies at Yahoo is dying down. While good arguments were made on both sides of the issue, what got lost in the charged debate was the potential for evolving traditional business models through changing the employee-employer relationship.

Entrepreneurship

What did Yahoo Buy? Problems and Opportunities in Learning from Others

Wall Street Journal reports that Nick D’Aloisio, who is 17 years old, has sold his company to Yahoo Inc. for an undisclosed price that is rumoured to be above 10 million dollar. Nick D’Aloisio started work on the free newsreader app Summly when he was 15, and it became a successful tool to quickly read news summaries. Yahoo has now closed down Summly. Puzzling, you might say, because Yahoo might have continued to operate it instead. So did they just buy a competitor in order to kill it? Are they taking a pause in order to re-launch it?

Entrepreneurship

Are Accountants and CFOs Killing Innovation?

What can you do when penny-pinchers get in the way of your disruptive ideas to make necessary, often disruptive, changes in your company?

Entrepreneurship

CIO: Enabling Innovation

Globalisation has changed the rules of the game and it takes a certain kind of person to play by them. But where do you find these people and how do you get them on your team?

Entrepreneurship

Ups and Downs: Communities and Corporate Giving following Events and Disasters

With the Ski World Championship about to end in Schladming, I am reminded of my trip to Hakuba, Japan, last year. It is a great place for alpine skiing that has ski runs and other facilities made for the 1998 Nagano Olympics. I plan to go back there this year. But it also has some facilities that are not used much anymore, and its location in an isolated valley makes me wonder how it handled such a large event as the Olympics. The same could be said for Nagano prefecture, which is far from Japan’s center in population and economy.

Entrepreneurship

Tesla’s Model S: Technology Outruns the Business Model

In our recent blog post on HBR blogging network we discussed the Tesla Model S, which is arguably the most promising all-electric contender for a slice of the luxury sedan market, but was panned recently by New York Times reporter John Broder, who finished his test-drive on the back of a flatbed truck. Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla Motors, was quick to respond with accusations that the test was not performed under fair conditions. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute, though, one thing is clear: Tesla has some way to go before it can get motorists to buy into its vision of an all-electric no-compromises luxury sedan.

Entrepreneurship

Assessing the Impact Potential of Investments in Social Entrepreneurship

Last July, in Lugano – Switzerland, I spoke at the first-ever conference on Partnering for Global Impact (PGI). This is an annual platform, organized in collaboration with INSEAD, dedicated to impact investors and social entrepreneurs, so that both sides can meet and make deals that support the scaling up of social enterprises.

Entrepreneurship

Insider Trading and Investors: Avoiding the Stigma of Misconduct

Wall Street Journal reports that the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LP is losing investors at a rapid pace, with 1.7 billion dollar (one quarter of the total outside investments) at risk of being withdrawn. In a regular mutual fund, such a wave of withdrawals would have been disastrous because funds lose money when selling large amounts of stock in a short period of time. SAC can handle the situation because it has rules limiting withdrawal speed (normal for hedge funds) plus it is backed by 9 billion dollar of money invested by its fund manager and employees. So this is a serious situation but not a meltdown.

Entrepreneurship

A New Perspective on the Longevity and Success of Family Firms

A common statistic presented by many researchers and consultants on family business suggests that only 30% of family firms are able to succeed to the second generation of the family, with the number decreasing to 13% for the third generation and a mere 3% for the fourth generation. This last number suggests that fewer than 1 in 30 entrepreneurs could aspire to keep their firms healthy and family controlled by the 4th generation, 60-80 years later. This somewhat depressing number is used as evidence of the challenges in managing family firms and the difficulty of passing the leadership to the next generation.

Economics & Finance

Extreme Focus and the Success of Germany’s Mittelstand

In a recent post on Harvard Business Review bloggers network, we discuss the extreme focus business model of Germany’s famed Mittlestand:

Entrepreneurship

What do Voltaire and Social Media Have in Common?

“We must cultivate our garden.” – Candide, Voltaire, 1759

Entrepreneurship

Cleaning up the Auto Industry

Dirty habits die hard and the only way to encourage auto makers to adopt clean technology is a short sharp shock in the fuel price. It’s a radical approach, but research suggests it could work.

Strategy

Making Tyres for the Cognoscenti

Pirelli tyres mean race cars, sports cars and glamour but the man driving the company understands that to be number one on the fast track, you have to watch the landscape as well.

Entrepreneurship

Etihad’s Jet Air Investment: The Great Alliance Game

Jet Airways of India has increased its revenue and turned to positive profits this quarter. This is in part because of the troubles of competitor Kingfisher Airlines, but it is also helped by cost reductions, especially in fuel. The good news is very timely because Jet Airways is in talks to sell a 24% ownership stake to Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates airlines. Although Etihad is already likely to pay well for the strategic value of the Jet Airways investment, the profits will make the price even higher.

Entrepreneurship

The Challenge of Innovation: How companies can stay at the top in the 21st Century

Charles Dow, the American journalist who, in the late 19th century, first popularized the stock market index, always chose the most stable and reliable companies to be part of his index. Yet, of the first 100 corporations ever listed in the Dow-Jones index , only one still remains today– General Electric. All others went bankrupt or became a shadow of their former greatness.

Entrepreneurship

Community Imprinting: Why do some Communities Work better than others?

It is possible to find a list of the best and worst-run cities in the US on the following blog: http://247wallst.com/2013/01/15/the-best-and-worst-run-cities-in-america/#ixzz2IWFW3Xys The best run city is Plano, Texas, followed by Madison, Wisconsin; the worst was San Bernardino, California, followed by Miami, Florida. How was the list made? To quote, “we looked at factors like the city’s credit rating, poverty, education, crime, unemployment, and regional GDP.” That seems a bit unfair. Poverty, unemployment, and regional GDP are outcomes of the local economy, which may be influenced by city government but is surely not run by it. None of these cities have a centrally planned economy.

Entrepreneurship

Ecosystem Economics TM is the New Industrial Model

Great News for the CEO of large companies! There are entrepreneurs out there working on solving the problems that you face running your FTSE 100 business, or your medium-sized enterprise of 1000 employees, or your multinational. You have scale, distribution, reach, audience, established brand and reputation: you are a highway. But the entrepreneur, the digital industrialist, is the car that will drive you into the high-growth, digital economy. The cars need a highway for high-growth, and you can put in a toll booth to exact your fee for the assets you’re ‘sharing’.

Entrepreneurship

Why Entrepreneurs Fail: On Average Correct, but Overconfident most of the Time

Autobiographies by successful entrepreneurs often depict their business success as being “against all odds,” accomplished only through extraordinary effort and sometimes also luck at critical junctures. They are right. Successfully starting an entrepreneurial venture is against the odds, as least as far as we can tell from the statistics that are available. Although the numbers differ by nation, the 50-5 rule that more than 50% of all new ventures are gone in 5 years is pretty good (perhaps a bit optimistic). A venture that closes within its first five years has probably lost money. On the upside, the ventures that make it past the 5-year mark are highly likely to survive the next five year.

Entrepreneurship

Frugal Innovation: A New Business Paradigm

GUEST COMMENTARY: What do Renault-Nissan, Siemens, and Unilever have in common? They are all pioneers of a groundbreaking business strategy called frugal innovation.

Entrepreneurship

What They Can’t Always Teach You In B-Schools…

Michael Kowalzik never thought he’d be running a successful German technology company when he graduated from INSEAD in 2000. Then again, the products and services he is providing for global companies didn’t exist twelve years ago. He had to invent a whole new business model.

Entrepreneurship

It’s Not Just German Engineering

The German luxury car market has not lost speed through the recession, despite high production costs and slack demand in Europe. The secret of success lies not just under the hood but in the boardroom and the research labs.

Entrepreneurship

On a Tax Scandal in Greece, and How to Get a Diverse and Free Press

Along with its bond payment troubles, austerity measures, unemployment, and protests, Greece is experiencing a scandal over possibly undeclared income and unpaid taxes among its elite. The story is interesting and confusing, and it involves the press as a key actor.

Entrepreneurship

Your CEO’s Child: How it Affects your Wages

We can all recall or imagine the scene seen in many firms, large or small: Somebody has a child, and the employees are gathering to celebrate the happy occasion. Let’s make the scene more concrete by saying that the person celebrating the birth of a child is the CEO (chief executive officer), who happens to be a man. Now, if workers are celebrating a CEO becoming a father, there might be some tensions in the room. Some are especially eager to congratulate, thinking of it as good career management. Or maybe they are just especially happy for him, but their coworkers suspect them of doing career management. Things are never completely easy around CEOs.

Economics & Finance

Business Model Innovation: The Gift that Keeps Giving

In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review bloggers network, we discuss the sustainability of the advantage that come from innovating the business model. With the Winter holiday shopping season, fashion apparel retailer Zara has been the focus of media attention — the New York Times recently profiled the innovative fast fashion business model pioneered by Zara, while Elizabeth Cline’s book on the costs of fast fashion has climbed up the sales charts.

Economics & Finance

What Makes Industrial Excellence?

European managers reveal the strategies that put them ahead at the annual event created by INSEAD, WHU (Germany) and IESE (Spain).

Entrepreneurship

Liquidating Twinkies: When Pension Benefits Fail to Go Quietly

After the first news struck the US media like a shock, the follow-up has been quiet and predictable. Hostess Brands, the maker of such classic snacks as Twinkies and Ho Hos (thanks to a European upbringing I have no idea what I am writing about), has been given permission to enter bankruptcy proceedings and liquidate its assets by the oddly appropriately named Judge Drain. That means job losses of 18,500 jobs and a search for buyers for its 30 or so brands and many production plants, distribution centers, and other assets.

Entrepreneurship

When Business Models Trump Technology

In a recent blog post on Harvard Business Review we discuss one of these frequent situations in which business model innovation is necessary to bring technological innovation to life. In case you missed it, the2012 World Food Prize went to Daniel Hillel, an Israeli scientist who, in his own words, “…helped to develop the principle of shifting from low-frequency, high-volume irrigation to high-frequency, low-volume irrigation”, the system known as drip irrigation.

Entrepreneurship

The Bengal Army Mutiny, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street

In 1857, 142 regiments of the East India Company’s Bengal Native Army in India mutinied against their commanders, leading to one of the most serious military confrontations between Indians and the British colonial rule until its dissolution. In 1989, demonstrations occurred throughout East Germany, including weekly demonstration marches from the Nikolai Church to the Karl Marx Square in Leipzig. Starting at the end of 2010, the Arab Spring has in many nations revolved around a weekly cycle of protests that culminate after Friday prayer.

Entrepreneurship

Creating and Sustaining the Innovative Edge

The United States may be the centre of the 21st century invention and ideas renaissance, but a new ranking shows Asia’s emerging markets are catching up.

Entrepreneurship

Are you winning the global innovation game or are you being left behind?

Being successful at innovation today means changing the way you think about where critical knowledge comes from and how to use it.

Entrepreneurship

Looking a Leader, Becoming a Leader: Assertiveness versus Deference

The third presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney had a one-on-one format that was in part a dialogue of the two, in part each of them addressing the camera and the moderator. In a dialogue format they get a chance to show how they address each other.

Entrepreneurship

How to Manoeuver in Space

The battle for a bigger share of the commercial satellite market is heating up as demand skyrockets for new multimedia services. Innovative satellite technologies are cutting the cost of market entry. But what else does it take to secure a foothold in space?

Entrepreneurship

Zynga’s Falling Shares, and the Fall of Entrepreneurship as Internet Firms Grow (Old)

We have just been treated to news on how many publicly listed Internet firms that gave stock or stock options to their employees have seen major declines in the value of their stock. Famous firms like Zynga and Facebook have been hit, as well as some less well-known ones. The immediate concern for these firms is that they are losing some of their employees, who have seen the big stock payoffs they anticipated (and briefly had) disappear. In fact, this has not happened yet, at least on a large scale, but executives worry that employees might leave once the job market gives them better outside options.

Entrepreneurship

Why Apple Has to Manufacture in China

Apple gets a lot of stick about manufacturing in China, and the issue came up again recently with the release of the iPhone 5. A recent article on the “Cult of Mac”contrasts Apple to Timbuk2, a US producer of traveler and messenger bags, that proudly locates most of its of its manufacturing in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places on earth. The workers in the factory are neither overworked nor are they underpaid, yet Timbuk2 is not struggling financially unlike many other US-based manufacturers. This begs the question: can’t Apple do the same and move jobs back from China? We covered this issue in a recent post on HBR network.

Entrepreneurship

Who should lead Procter & Gamble out of the crisis?

Procter & Gamble (P&G) has had poor financial results as of late, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that its CEO Robert McDonald is under pressure from hedge fund manager William Ackman. Ackman is convinced that Mr. McDonald is not the right person to lead P&G because of apparent inaction in the face of a three-year run of profit declines. I have earlier argued that it is simplistic to just argue for CEO replacement when things go poorly, and I could make the same case here: P&G has a high-quality, high-price position in many markets, which means it will temporarily suffer when the economy is doing poorly. In the long run it may do better by holding firm and waiting for the recovery than by changing its position.

Entrepreneurship

INSEAD Knowledge Launches New Online Platform

Online Portal Showcases Business School’s Thought Leadership; Provides Insight, Intellect and Impact on Global Business Topics.

Economics & Finance

Making car manufacturing sane: Business Model Innovation at Volkswagen

After a brief hiatus due to vacations and travel over summer, the Renaissance Innovator blog is back! While I was catching up on the stack of journals which accumulated over summer, a Fortune article about Volkswagen which describes transformation of the company from a local German producer to a global phenomenon with over €160B in sales caught my eye. Volkswagen has quietly passed General Motors and Toyota last year to become the largest automotive maker in the world. So what is its secret?

Entrepreneurship

The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2012

Why are some companies able to create and sustain a high innovation premium while others don’t?

Entrepreneurship

Knight Capital Group: Did an Accidentally Evil Computer Knock Down a Trading House?

Knight Capital Group (www.knight.com) is a trading house that helps others access financial markets by executing their trades. It serves as a designated market marker, which means that it provides buy/sell orders so that others can always execute a trade against it, for more than 600 securities on the NYSE and NASDAQ stock exchanges. It also serves as a market maker for many other securities. Because market making and trading are key activities in financial markets, requiring reliable and honest dealing, it is no wonder that its web site carries the slogan “The Standard of Trust.”

Entrepreneurship

JAL’s Recovery: Philosophy or Practice?

There is mounting excitement over how well Japan Airlines (JAL) is emerging from bankruptcy to now have good profit margins (17 percent last year) and the confidence to start adding routes again after a period of cutting. As always when there is excitement about a firm, there will also be a great deal of hype. Can we separate the parts of the recovery that are genuinely interesting for observers (and worrying for competitors) from the hype? I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can make a few suggestions.

Entrepreneurship

Global Innovation Index 2012

Report shows Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore most innovative.

Leadership & Organisations

Dream your way to success

It’s not all about business plans and spreadsheets and getting to the next goal. The picture of real success is at least partly in your mind.

Entrepreneurship

Competing for the cloud

Cloud computing has made life easy for millions of users. But it’s a different story for software companies providing those cloud-based services: the field is small, the game is fast and the battle for dominance is fierce. SAP is determined to win.

Entrepreneurship

Golden Parachutes under the Microscope: The Xstrata and Glencore Merger

A merger between mining company Xstrata and commodities-trader Glencore would seem like a great opportunity for the two companies to gain market power through the control of both mining and trading, as well as the ability to use subtle trading signals to control mining operations in ways that non-trading miners would not be able to. Whether for power or efficiency reasons, the merger must look attractive to the two firms. It is large and complicated too. In total it involves a market value of around $58 billion for the two companies; Xstrata employs 70,000 people, Glencore 58,000 people.

Entrepreneurship

An Online Travel Startup Grows Up

M. Reddy, A. Bajpai

India-based iXiGO launched five years ago in a nascent online travel sector that’s since mushroomed into one of India’s most competitive companies. Now the company has received a new round of venture-backed funding. What next?

Economics & Finance

Will multinationals from the emerging world take over?

Today's emerging markets are also "emerging" as big businesses on a global stage. What explains their success and how serious of a threat are they to dominant multinationals in the West?

Entrepreneurship

The high cost of connectivity: it’s not just you who’s paying

The mobile telecom industry is about much more than telephone calls today. A huge and increasingly sophisticated user base wants the world at their fingertips. But who’s going to pay for it all?

Entrepreneurship

Rajat Gupta’s Insider Trading Conviction: One Network to Bring Them All and in the Darkness Bind Them

Former McKinsey & Company head and Goldman and Procter & Gamble board member Rajat Gupta has been convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy for giving away confidential information from boardroom meetings. This makes him the latest in a string of convictions related to the insider trading scandal centered on hedge fund Galleon Group. The court cases since the scandal have revealed a pattern of information collection from board directors followed by quick and profitable trades, with involvement all the way to Galleon’s top. Its founder Raj Rajaratnam was convicted in October 2011, and many Galleon traders have also been convinced, as have their information sources.

Entrepreneurship

WaMu: The Mutual Bank that De-Mutualized and Melted Down

Wall Street Journal contributor Kirstin Grind has written a book on the downfall of WaMu, the second largest bank failure in the US (so far) and the name that has come to symbolize risky mortgage lending in the USA. I expect to enjoy reading it when it comes out, and learn more about the inside story. Here is some of what we know already.

Operations

Outclassing Sourcing Champions

With increasing specialization, technological complexity, and globalization, firms now buy a long list of products and services from many outside providers. In industries like automobiles, consumer electronics and retail, reliably sourcing a multitude of products from supply chain partners is the key to success.

Entrepreneurship

What Kind of Company is Splunk?

Let me begin by answering the question in the title. Splunk (http://www.splunk.com/company) describes itself as a company founded to “make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone.” With machine data they mean not just any data on a computer, but rather the data generated by machines rather than humans; by accessible they mean that they are making programs to analyse data that would normally be in an unstructured form, so not in a database.

Entrepreneurship

Key Take-Aways from the GITR 2012

The GITR is more than a list of 142 countries’ Networked Readiness; they also provide a view of how the industry of technology is developing in each country and taken together; this provides a global view of the world’s economic and social development.

Entrepreneurship

GITR 2012 - Singapore: Why it’s not No. 1

Singapore trailed behind Sweden [again] this year. With its robust infrastructure, healthy fundamentals and a progressive government, what’s keeping Singapore from taking the top spot?

Entrepreneurship

GITR 2012 - Sweden: Why it's No.1;

Anna-Karin Hatt, Sweden’s Minister for IT, said that the country’s early investment in technology infrastructure has paid off.

Entrepreneurship

GITR 2012 - U.S. on downward trajectory

The steady decline of the United States to the #8 position in the NRI this year is an indication of how the country is failing to leverage ICT to drive economic productivity and social development.

Entrepreneurship

What is our networked readiness?

When the INSEAD/WEF Global Information Technology Report was created 11 years ago, the countries with the most fixed-line telephones were the best-connected in the world. Today, it’s a much different story.

Entrepreneurship

The Late-Goal Effect: Risk-taking and Deadlines

Last week Manchester City became Premier League champions after a nail-biting match that had them lagging 1 to 2 by the end of regulation time, and so second in the Premier League after local rivals Manchester United, but then recovering with two injury-time goals to win the match and league.

Entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur’s motivation

Show me the money? Entrepreneurs don’t always look at financial rewards as the best thing in being their own bosses.

Entrepreneurship

What if Our Best People Join the Competition?

Readers of the business press have been watching the slow decline of the famous New York law firm Dewey and LeBoeuf, which took on too much debt and is reported to be investigating financial misconduct by one of its leaders.

Entrepreneurship

A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation

Ron Adner

The innovator’s quest has been to find the win-win proposition: a great new product that can create differentiated value for consumers while supporting differentiated profits for the producer.

Entrepreneurship

Network Theory and Drone Attacks

Chances are that you will find a news story about a drone attack on militants within a week of reading this blog post. They have become common in Pakistan, and are now used in other places such as Somalia and Yemen. Drone attacks are expensive, with the missile alone costing more than USD 50,000, plus the cost of operating the drone. The expected payoff of drone attacks is to weaken insurgencies such as the Taliban. But do they work?

Entrepreneurship

The Darwinian Workplace in the WinnerS-take-all Organizations

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review features an article “The Darwinian Workplace” on promoting healthy competition in the workplace that I co-authored. The key message of the article is based on several research projects with highly innovative technology companies that implemented tournaments among its workers to increase worker productivity and, at the same time, to increase firm’s profitability.

Entrepreneurship

Olympus Cover-up: Beware of Unstable Power

Last week we were treated to the spectacle of Olympus Corp. having its first stockholder’s meeting after CEO Michael Woodford lost his job after alerting the firm’s board of directors of possible accounting irregularities.

Entrepreneurship

It’s time to diversify diversity

Diversity matters—in teams and companies. In fact, recent research at McKinsey mirrors other studies of top management diversity around the world. McKinsey found that U.K., French, German, and U.S. companies ranking in the top quartile of executive-board diversity, as measured by gender and international differences, delivered returns on equity at least 50 percent higher and earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins 14 percent higher than those in the bottom quartile. Not bad results, but they could be even better.

Entrepreneurship

Instagram for $1 Billion: What is it Really Worth?

Facebook has just acquired the maker of the iPhone application Instagram, which lets users do simple photo editing and sharing with friends, including social-network functions such as “like” and comments.

Entrepreneurship

How to Innovate for a Greener World (and Make Money)

In the minds of both consumers and managers going green is typically thought as being associated with an additional expense. We see this in food stores, for instance, where organic products cost more. Despite this general perception, there exists a simple approach for just about any organization or household to become more sustainable and make more money in the process.

Entrepreneurship

Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovators ask the right questions, observe the world like anthropologists, network for novel ideas, and experiment to make things work. (For a more detailed look at these skills, see The Innovator’s DNA).

Entrepreneurship

The Band AKB48 and Organizational Capabilities

If you do not live in Asia, you may not know the band AKB48 very well, but chances are that you will hear about them soon. They are a Japanese all-girl pop music band (if the name applies) that have something between 90 and 100-plus members depending on what level of affiliation you count.

Entrepreneurship

Generating New Business Opportunities

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been teaching a newly developed INSEAD MBA course on Identifying New Business Opportunities (INBO). The class is structured as a hands on experiential workshop that combines three novel approaches to Innovation/Entrepreneurship: Business Model Innovation, Idea Tournaments and Lean Startups/Discovery Driven Planning.

Entrepreneurship

Nokia and Apple: What’s market power got to do with it?

Javier Gimeno

As Charlie’s previous post highlights, the flip of market dominance between Nokia and Apple has indeed been a powerful illustration of the unprecedented dynamism of modern markets. We tend to learn a lot from such outlier events. Why did a successful organization like Nokia lose its ability to innovate? Why did they miss the market new trends? How could Apple, a complete outsider to the mobile industry, capture such a dominant position?

Entrepreneurship

Why is Foxconn’s Alliance with Sharp a Problem for Sony and Apple?

Foxconn and Sharp just announced an alliance that involves a purchase of Sharp shares by Foxconn, sales of LCD screens from Sharp to Foxconn, and Foxconn access to Sharp LCD technology.

Entrepreneurship

Bang Bang Films: Creating a commercial revolution in India

Move over, Bollywood. One startup advertising agency is out to hire your directors…

Entrepreneurship

Why innovators don't always win

Experience shows that good ideas and early success aren’t enough. What does it take to stay on top?

Responsibility

Entrepreneurship awards and grants: are they worth the chall

Grants are a vital part of early capital-raising for many social enterprises. But can the distraction in competing for these awards affect the development of the business?

Entrepreneurship

When the startup is YOU

Being an entrepreneur isn’t all about creating something new. Sometimes the hard work is inside: fine-tuning yourself for the journey within.

Entrepreneurship

Don't make it; buy it!

There’s more than one way to become an entrepreneur: instead of starting your own company, you can go out and buy one.

Entrepreneurship

Tesla and Toyota: The Unlikely Partners

Tesla Motors, the specialized maker of all-electrical vehicles, now has three vehicles in its lineup. They completed their initial public offering of stocks in 2010, and say that the subsidized loan they got from the US Department of Energy loan was helpful but not necessary for their commercial success. They seem to be having a very good year, and to have hit on the right concept by selling all-electrical vehicles in the luxury niche rather than the mass-market niche that many other auto makers have favored.

Strategy

The Fuel for Kindle’s Fire: Ecosystem Strategy

Ron Adner

The most viable rival to Apple’s iPad isn’t produced by a traditional hardware firm. Where Samsung, Motorola, Toshiba, HP, RIM and HTC have hardly made a dent in Apple’s dominance, it is online retailer Amazon with its Kindle Fire tablet, that has emerged as the lead contender.

Entrepreneurship

Apple’s New iPad: Power and Temptation

One of the most important changes in the new iPad is not visible: they are not all the same. So-called “tear-down” reports from reporters taking them apart and analyzing the components have shown that Apple is getting some key components from multiple suppliers. Early reports indicate three different suppliers for displays and flash memory chips, for example. This is different from earlier versions of the iPad, which relied more on single sources for its components.

Entrepreneurship

SXSW: INSEAD @ South by Southwest

The 2012 edition of the South by Southwest conference (SWSX) wrapped up in Austin last week. Over the last years, this has become one of hottest stops on the startup circuit, earning a reputation as the biggest breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies– notably, both foursquare and twitter catapulted to the big leagues after they presented early versions at SWSX.

Entrepreneurship

Innovating Presidential Elections: What Can one Learn from the Russian Experience?

Recent presidential elections in Russia have drawn worldwide attention over the last few months. There was, however, one aspect of elections which did not receive as much coverage in the western press (at least in my opinion).

Entrepreneurship

Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Success through a new Manager?

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner program is getting a new manager, Larry Loftis, who is the current manager of the highly successful 777 program. It is hard to be surprised at a change in management of this program, which delivered its first aircraft 3 year behind schedule and has been plagued by design and manufacturing problems. The latest one was discovered one month ago. It makes sense that a project in trouble should have a new manager, and that this new manager should have a track record of success. That’s the way to fix problems, isn’t it?

Entrepreneurship

What is the “best” way to innovate?

MIT Sloan Management Review just came out with the latest 2012 picks for the world’s most innovative companies. This is a great list which includes 50 very interesting companies (mostly young) in a number of industries. While I enjoyed reading about these innovative companies, I could not help but be once again disappointed with the exclusive focus on product and technology innovators on the list and the lack of Business Model Innovators.

Entrepreneurship

Transfer, Promote, or Hire? It Depends on whether you Need Performance Soon

A while ago I saw that Wall Street Journal reported an increase in formal programs for lateral transfers in US corporations, including majors such as Intel. The description of these programs looked sufficiently similar to the job rotation of Japanese firms that I started wondering whether employment practices somehow swam across the Pacific when no one was looking: US firms are starting job rotation just as Japanese firms are starting outside hiring.

Entrepreneurship

How Disposable Tissue Turned into the New Art Form

Any marketer understands the importance of product differentiation. One CEO with an interest in art went one step further and developed a luxury fashion item in the least likely of market sectors: toilet paper.

Entrepreneurship

Where are the jobs? A UK perspective

Unemployment is rampant. One million youths out of work. Where will the new jobs come from? The answer to this question comes in two parts: the Good News and the Bad News.

Entrepreneurship

Dark Shirts and Symbolic Management

One of the most recent news stories on Apple features a picture of CEO Tim Cook addressing an audience dressed in a dark shirt. It made me look twice because I initially thought he was wearing the same kind of turtleneck sweater made famous by Steve Jobs (and designed by Issey Miyake).

Entrepreneurship

Making Cars Electric, One Country at a Time

Not that long ago, I talked about one of the most interesting startups I know of, an Israeli company called Better Place, which has the promise to accomplish what 170 years of technology innovation failed to achieve. What I am talking about is the elusive dream of electric vehicles and the constant struggle of word’s best scientists to combat two basic issues with electric vehicles: the range anxiety and the high cost of batteries.

Entrepreneurship

Foxconn, Avestin, and Organizational Boundaries

The news last week included two stories that present dilemmas for the companies involved, and are good illustrations of how the boundaries of organizations are becoming difficult to draw in the modern economy.

Entrepreneurship

INSEAD wins top global case study award

Marketing Case Study of Portugal’s Renova Black Toilet Paper is #1

Entrepreneurship

Rank and Risk among Traders

News are coming out that some banks are reducing bonuses for their employees or even invoking clawback clauses (taking back bonuses already given) because of low financial results, or even results that needed to be re-stated because of losses unknown at the time.

Entrepreneurship

The Henry Ford of Cardiac Surgery

Cardiac surgery is a sophisticated, dangerous and delicate procedure; but an Indian surgeon and his hospital group have successfully transformed it into a factory style mass operation, bringing high quality care to the many millions who could never before afford it. Dr. Devi Shetty’s Bangalore based flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

Entrepreneurship

Teaching old firms new tricks

Those who follow the business news often come across stories on how firms are going to start doing new things in order to improve customer service, strategic position, profitability, or some other reason. Maybe it is a merchant bank that wants to add investment banking or private banking services, a ferry operator that wants to add cruise tours, or a music distributor that wants to add an airline. How hard can it be? Notable successes notwithstanding, the firms often end up proving the same point as the “Top Gear” program hosts do when they try to answer the question; How hard can it be? It can be really hard.

Entrepreneurship

Is there such thing as fair price?

Among Renaissance Innovations that dramatically changed airline industries around the world is dynamic pricing.

Entrepreneurship

Innovation Networks: a la Google or a la Apple?

Andrew Shipilov

A recent article in International Herald Tribune entitled “Yin and Yang of corporate creativity” describes two approaches to innovation, one of Apple and another of Google. The Google approach is a bottom up, open innovation which is based on rapid experimentation and receiving quick customer feedback. The Apple model is more top down model where the company achieves close to perfect integration of different elements in the product and then pushes it down to customers (remember a now famous comment from Jobs: it’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want).

Entrepreneurship

Carnival’s Shipwreck

It is now two weeks since the cruise ship Costa Concordia hit a reef less than 100 meters from Giglio. The evacuation that followed was characterized by delays and incorrect information given to the Coast Guard and to passengers. Most notoriously Captain Schettino abandoned ship before the completion of the evacuation and did not follow a Coast Guard order to re-board it. The evacuation turned deadly, with fatalities thought to exceed 30.

Entrepreneurship

The Renaissance Innovator joins the INSEAD bloggers network!

From today, our blog,The Renaissance Innovator, is part of the official INSEAD bloggers network. So if you arrived here through the INSEAD blog, Welcome to our blog and read on for what this blog is about. For our loyal regular readers, nothing changes, you can read our blog posts exactly as you did before, and we’d also recommend checking out some of the other excellent posts on the INSEAD blog.

Entrepreneurship

South by Southeast

During the INSEAD Leadership Summit Middle East on 22 January, my colleague, Antonio Fatas, Portuguese Council Chaired Professor of European Studies and Professor of Economics at INSEAD, presented a map of the world with a red dot representing the center of gravity of world economic activity.

Entrepreneurship

How to benefit from closed networks?

Andrew Shipilov

Let’s continue reviewing basic topics in inter-personal networking. We learned that an individual with open inter-personal network is a person whose friends don’t know each other. This individual is considered to be a broker, because he or she can combine information and knowledge from some of his/her network contacts and create something new and innovative. We also know that some people are simply hardwired in their brains to become brokers, because they are more manipulative with their network contacts than the others (see the previous post on self-monitoring).

Entrepreneurship

Kodak versus Fujifilm

The news about Kodak’s entry into Chapter 11 was paired with a Wall Street Journal story on how Fujifilm faced the same threat of digital photography, but were able to successfully adapt to the new challenges. To me, Kodak’s descent into bankruptcy is almost unimaginable, because I remember how dominant it was in film sales. I worked some summers in a photo store selling film and cameras. At the time, Kodak films were the most expensive, followed by Fuji and then Agfa.

Entrepreneurship

Start-up Sutra

I have been researching, teaching and advising entrepreneurs in Asia for the last decade, perched on INSEAD’s Singapore campus. My intention in starting this blog was to write on a semi-regular basis about entrepreneurship in emerging Asia. Unlike the Kama Sutra for example, Start-up Sutra is not necessarily a ‘how to’ manual. Rather, I hope to inspire as well as inform. The ideas, issues, best-practices and dilemmas I will discuss would stem from both context-independent academic research as well as more Asia specific challenges in building new ventures.

Entrepreneurship

The imitator’s dilemma

I have enjoyed the book “The Innovator’s DNA” by my INSEAD colleague Hal Gregersen with Jeff Dyer and Clayton M. Christensen. It made me recall the earlier book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, and realize that part of my own research has been on a complementary issue. These books document the difficulties in maintaining and directing innovation efforts, and one possible response to them would be to say: Why bother innovating if I can wait for others to innovate and focus on being the best at implementing the innovation?

Entrepreneurship

John Deere in Spain

Courage, adaptability, and the ability to anticipate brought John Deere’s Spanish tractor manufacturing operations from the brink of oblivion to the pinnacle of success, and an award for industrial excellence. The CEO tells INSEAD Knowledge how he did it.

Entrepreneurship

Who is more likely to become a broker [in a network]?

Andrew Shipilov

Some blog posts ago we started talking about individuals who occupy brokerage positions in open networks, a.k.a. brokers. These are the people whose network contacts are not connected to each other. We also learned that brokers were more likely to generate good ideas, be promoted faster and get better salary raises. But who is likely to be a broker?

Entrepreneurship

Changing the Way People Give…

The world is full of problems– poverty, malnutrition, medical access, climate change, natural disasters, etc. It is also full of many tenacious do-gooders with solutions, and thankfully many generous souls who would like to financially support these do-gooders. Unfortunately, the “marketplace” that matches the do-gooders with solutions is what economists would call very inefficient, that is many matches that are in the interest of everyone involved are not made.

Entrepreneurship

Networks and Job Search

Andrew Shipilov

The never-ending financial crisis has sadly cost many people their jobs. It is well-known that networking can help people find jobs, but what is the most effective way of networking?

Entrepreneurship

To focus or not to focus (on patients, that is)?

As I am preparing for a teaching session in a couple of weeks in Moscow, I realized that we had not written about one of the older but even more relevant today innovation. Some months back I blogged about a very cool startup Diapers.com which was founded by my former students in 2005 and which was recently acquired by Amazon.com.

Entrepreneurship

A New Model for Gifts!

Christmas is in the air and I am sure many of you have been buying gifts for your loved ones. Not to be the Grinch– but there is strong empirical evidence that shows that gift-giving destroys a third of gift value. Gift-receivers on average, value gifts a third less than what the gift giver paid for it! Essentially, gifts are really inefficient ways to show you care. But, a startup conceived and developed in one of our classes on renaissance innovation has an elegant solution to offer.

Entrepreneurship

Networking: Is it vital to an entrepreneur’s success?

Can sharing an idea help take it from the drawing board to the marketplace? Talk may cost nothing but new research indicates it gives an entrepreneur a better chance of success.

Entrepreneurship

Retail innovations for the 21st century

A few related things happened this week which all prompted me to write about retail innovations. First, a startup company I am advising, Objective Logistics, has received a round of funding from Google Ventures and Atlas Ventures.

Entrepreneurship

Renault-Nissan: Building with BRICs

Carlos Ghosn is spending more than a billion US Dollars to get a better foothold in Brazil.

Entrepreneurship

Individual capitalism

At a time when business and industry are going through mega-changes and Wall Street capitalism comes under fire, the energy and innovation of the entrepreneur are more important than ever, says the founder and CEO of Ariadne Capital.

Entrepreneurship

Is there a place for entrepreneurs in the Arab world?

Where does the new breed of Emirati entrepreneurs fit in to a landscape dominated by multinationals and big family-owned Arab businesses?

Entrepreneurship

Picturing the art of business

Put creative design and MBA students together in the right environment and the best of business and innovation can rub off on both. INSEAD MBAs visit the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Entrepreneurship

The DNA of the World's Most Innovative Companies

Innovation makes millionaires and undermines monopolies. It raises the profitability of companies and puts a premium on the shares of the most successful. But how can companies foster it? New research sheds light on the innovation process and how firms can tap into it to raise their performance and their share price.

Entrepreneurship

Can you really make money online?

Ecommerce startup investment options are plentiful in Asia, so how do you capitalise and avoid losing it all?

Entrepreneurship

Can you innovate your business model?

Business models help support strategic goals, but too often executives don't inject them with the necessary dose of creativity to bring about real success, according to new research by two INSEAD professors.

Entrepreneurship

Can you innovate your business model?

Business models help support strategic goals, but too often executives don't inject them with the necessary dose of creativity to bring about real success, according to new research by two INSEAD professors.

The Global Information Technology Report, 2010 - 2011

Entrepreneurship

Gauging the digital age

Ten years ago saw the end of the dot-com boom, but far from signifying the end of the digital era it heralded even greater technological advancement. The Global Information Technology Report (GITR), jointly published by INSEAD and the World Economic Forum, has been monitoring this progress for the last decade.

Entrepreneurship

The Next Microsoft: Here’s a partial list…

Innovation is flourishing despite a decline in venture capital funding. Silicon Valley veteran Adeo Ressi shares his predictions for life-changing technologies looking for funding.

Entrepreneurship

‘Question everything’

Sam Pitroda, IT and innovation advisor to India’s prime minister, speaks to INSEAD Knowledge Editor Stuart Pallister about innovation and the need for a new paradigm.

Economics & Finance

CEO view: Gary Wang (MBA ‘02J), founder of Tudou.com

Tudou.com, China's answer to YouTube with user-generated plus paid content, is one of the country's fastest-growing companies. Founder and INSEAD alumnus Gary Wang discusses strategy and what it takes to start and grow a media company in China.

Entrepreneurship

Western economies need to adapt

No longer content to be cost and talent arbitrage destinations, emerging markets are becoming hotbeds of innovation, says SD Shibulal, co-founder of Infosys Technologies, one of India's leading IT firms

Entrepreneurship

Teaching the spirit of entrepreneurship

The field of entrepreneurship owes a great deal to Joseph Schumpeter. He argued that innovation and technological change come from the "entrepreneur-spirit".

Entrepreneurship

Pushing the boundaries: innovation or imitation.

How do Asia's emerging giants measure on the innovation scale and can they shake off their reputation for imitation rather than innovation?

INSEAD eLab's Bruno Lanvin (left) and Nils Fonstad

Entrepreneurship

Where are the innovation skills?

A study into critical innovation and knowledge economy skills in Europe and Asia by INSEAD’s eLab has found there are striking differences between the regions.

Entrepreneurship

Venture creation: a new form of entrepreneurship?

INSEAD alum Fabian Hansmann (MBA '06D) has taken a novel approach to entrepreneurship. His organisation identifies opportunities and builds a team, but then matches business ideas and opportunities with aspiring entrepreneurs and also tries to raise funding.

Marketing

Indo-vation: tapping the Indian market

Two decades of trials have placed L'Oreal high in the Indian beauty market. But with still low penetration levels and cut-throat competition, where are the company's next opportunities

Strategy

Playing China’s internet market

Forget the massively popular Facebook. In China, it's all about Qzone and QQ and a host of other internet and mobile value added services that's caught the attention of China's Internet users.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship: inspiring ambitions

Entrepreneurs need to have plenty of self-confidence and be passionate about their projects – not just when starting up their own businesses but also when innovating within large corporations.

Entrepreneurship

Raising the bar on dyslexia treatment

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.

Economics & Finance

Upstart: China’s emergence in technology and innovation

It can easily appear as if China can make anything. Yet it makes goods not only at low cost, but now also of high quality, and this constitutes a particularly Chinese brand of innovation that enables China increasingly to shake up global markets. After coming of age in China’s domestic markets, Chinese firms are now replicating their domestic success in global markets by competing on price and quality. The success of the likes of Huawei and Lenovo are indicative of an emerging trend of Chinese technology and innovation, yet China’s emergence is only just beginning.

Entrepreneurship

Why social media are ‘absolutely crucial’ to businesses

In today’s age of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, social media constitute “an absolutely crucial part” of doing business, as many consumers around the world use social networks, says Thomas Crampton, Asia Pacific Director of 360 Digital Influence, an internet marketing communications arm of Ogilvy Public Relations.

Entrepreneurship

Wired in: who leads the networking world?

The answer is: look north – to Scandinavia. All four of those countries are in the top ten of The Networked Readiness Index 2009-2010, part of the Global Information Technology Report published by INSEAD and the World Economic Forum, now in its ninth edition.

Entrepreneurship

The double bottom line

The current economic malaise has sent investors looking for new avenues of investment - not just for the financial returns but also to make a difference in the world at large. Enter the socially-responsible investment, a niche market that is now coming of age.

Entrepreneurship

Coming of age

Until recently, it was not ‘natural’ to be a high-growth entrepreneur in Portugal. “It used to be ‘if you cannot find a good job, you become an entrepreneur by creating your own small business,’” says INSEAD Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, Filipe Santos, who is also the Director of the school’s Rudolf and Valeria Maag International Centre for Entrepreneurship (Maag ICE).

Entrepreneurship

Turning passion into opportunity

Entrepreneur Winnie So is so passionate about travel that after graduating with an MBA from INSEAD, she decided to set up Wanlilu Play, a Hong Kong-based bespoke, luxury travel planning company.

Entrepreneurship

The innovator's DNA

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.

Entrepreneurship

SME financing: small businesses struggle to survive

When it comes to securing financial support, entrepreneur Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of China's Alibaba Group, has this advice for small and medium-sized enterprises: don't rely on the government and the banks; rely instead on your family and friends.

Entrepreneurship

Powering the Google engine: innovation is key

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.

Entrepreneurship

Innovation: the key to future growth

Which is more innovative? The global conglomerate with revenue of $363 billion or the entrepreneur whose ground-breaking DoubleClick software package revolutionised online selling and was ultimately sold to Google for more than $3 billion? Answer: it’s a tie.

Entrepreneurship

The internet entrepreneur: ‘made, not born’

The internet has changed the way we live. Many of us now get our news online rather than from newspapers, fans connect with their favourite bands on music social networks rather than try to catch them after a concert, and we can get attractive high-street deals from the comfort of our home.

Entrepreneurship

INSEAD at 50: The defining years

The enduring idea on which INSEAD was founded came from the man considered to be one of the founders of the venture capital industry, Georges Doriot, a French-born, naturalised American who had both studied and taught at Harvard Business School.

Entrepreneurship

Capitalism thrives in virtual world

In the beginning, the online virtual world was a place for action video games such as Grand Theft Auto, or hanging out and chatting. Today, it’s a very different place. Commerce and capitalism have entered the picture.

Entrepreneurship

Sula Vineyards: India’s case for wine

When foreign sommeliers come to India, they come with very low expectations. After all, India is better known for its cotton industry than wine production. However that is now changing.

Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur’s vision of online social networking

Currently, Linneberg and his small team of eight people are busy with a new round of fundraising, developing OrSiSo’s advertising platform, and talking to potential advertisers.

Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur’s vision of online social networking

With the fast-growing proliferation of social networking sites on the internet, it’s become common for many people to spend time at work and at play socialising and making new friends online. Indeed, having several social networking accounts on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Flickr is par for the course for many, such as Singapore-based Danish entrepreneur Thorben Linneberg.

Entrepreneurship

Innovation booming in emerging markets despite obstacles

Traditional measures of innovation usually focus on science and technology, for example on patents produced, scientific papers published and PhD graduates in science and engineering. While the role of science and technology in driving innovation continues to be important, we are witnessing a new type of innovation in Latin America and other emerging markets, i.e. innovations that are more horizontal and more context dependent.

Entrepreneurship

The death of the corporate HQ?

Corporate headquarters may very well become a thing of the past, as it becomes a virtual network rather than a physical location, according to Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang, co-authors of 'The Quest for Global Dominance'.

Entrepreneurship

Social media analysis: a new way of listening

Social networking is a fast-growing online trend that is changing the media landscape, particularly in the way in which consumers and companies interact with each other. These sites enable community participation and include blogs, discussion forums, social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as consumer review sites. No editor is required, which means the content is not controlled and publishing costs are always near zero.

Entrepreneurship

Bringing zest to China’s hospitality market

By offering travellers chic boutique hotel amenities at budget prices, Chinese entrepreneur Wu Hai is now enjoying the fruits of his success, setting up a chain of 16 hotels in China in just three short years since 2006.

Leadership & Organisations

A Mantra of Business Success

INSEAD Knowledge

For Sir Martin Sorrell, Group CEO of marketing communications services giant WPP, the key to future business success lies in a short and simple mantra: new markets, new media, and consumer insight.

Entrepreneurship

A new era for innovations

Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and advisor to private and government clients worldwide, says “if you’re really determined to find that next big idea and time it right to make a difference, it typically takes 20 years from discovery to takeoff.”

Entrepreneurship

How Obama used social networking tools to win

In his bid to help Barack Obama become the 44th President of the United States, Scott Goodstein spearheaded the use of new social networking and mobile media platforms, harnessing technological innovations to expand the audience base for the Obama campaign.

Entrepreneurship

Dynamic architecture, rotating tower: yes, but will it fly?

For the past two years, David Fisher has made a name for himself by building towers in the sky. Literally.

Entrepreneurship

Think big, start small and move fast

Business school students have changed since Julie Meyer, the venture capitalist who is chief executive and founder of Ariadne Capital, did her MBA in the late 1990s. Then, no-one wanted to start their own business, she thought. Financing them, though, seemed more attractive to many.

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