You’ve worked for months. Spent endless hours in airports and bland hotel rooms around the world to meet with customers to understand their issues and needs. Poured over market data and read countless 10-Ks and analyst reports in order to calculate market sizes and market growth rates. Business development, finance and regulatory affairs staff provided […]
Executing a Three-Year Strategy with Twelve Months of Cash
When I was a graduate student in the 1990s at Harvard, a disproportionate number of students in the sciences were actively preparing themselves for jobs in the management consulting industry. They were being hired en masse by the most prestigious consulting firms in the world, not for their technical acumen (although many of them held […]
Delivering Value & New Products: Where to Start?
Developing and delivering new products should be an easy task. Design and rapid prototyping tools allow us to quickly model and test new designs, and more information than ever is available on consumer trends and buying habits. Despite having all of this technology and information available to us, the literature shows that some 40 percent of new […]
Discovering Value: Why Most Managers Fear and Leaders Embrace Risk
It seems there are innumerable ways individuals and organizations attempt to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. At a macro level, government seeks to create jobs. Academic efforts target the recruitment and retention of top students, offer talented faculty an opportunity to pursue efforts outside traditional education or research efforts, or pursue creative alternate funding mechanisms for […]
Find Value in the Forest, Not the Trees
Developing and delivering successful products and services is a monumental task requiring precise planning and execution plus an element of good fortune. Product managers and designers often focus on packing the new product full of the latest, best, and most desirable features only to have the product fall short of expectations in the marketplace. Market […]