Author: Philippe

Philippe has been training 200-300 startups a year since 2007, consulted for dozens of multinationals on rupture innovation or corporate incubation, and was directly involved in more than 150 startups building their market fit and scaling up their business. He also teaches business model innovation in key MBA programs whether they are in Paris or Shanghai. And since 2017, Philippe is now living in Amsterdam, one of the best European business hub around.

How the iPad Pro became our main work computer

After trying these last years to work with a first generation iPad and a year ago with a Surface Pro, I was not impressed — to say the least. But since a few months the iPad Pro has become my main computer. What has changed?

Three months ago I started to switch from my Mac desktop and laptop to an iPad. I was working in Shanghai giving classes and conferences thinking on how to have the most minimalist setup for this kind of interactions. When you focus on mobility and travel it’s difficult to beat a 9.7-inch iPad. And since the new ‘Pro’ version was readily available, there was the promise of removing past problems I encountered trying an iPad for work.

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My next keynote on the second coming of Cloud

My upcoming keynote for an undisclosed executive team will be trying to map out how businesses will be changed within the next three years by the next wave of cloud technologies.

Stéphanie and I are regularly delivering strategic keynotes for executive boards in various markets. They all address key issues at stake for specific industrial customers. They are also all wrapped under some form of NDA or another. While it’s always frustrating not to be able to share things, we try from time to time to afford some level of teasing…

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What constitues a good startup problem

It seems deceptively simple to define what constitues a good market problem to work on as a startup. It is actually rather subtle and for some part very counter-intuitive.

Most of the startups participating in one of my trainings are initially shocked at the inordinate amount of time I spend working on ‘the problem’. I’m certainly not alone there. Everyone who is regularly dealing with startups gets eventually frustrated to see how they concentrate en masse on building a product and not focusing on what the market actually needs. And while anyone who ambitions to shake a market’s status quo shouldn’t be too pragmatic, as much rationality as possible should nevertheless prevail. But, very few are the startups committed from launch to tackle a clear-cut problem.

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When Star Wars will be shot on iPhone

Most of companies just trudge in the future of their market very passively. With a poor strategic grasp on technology they usually wake up when their customers have no reason to speak to them anymore. They all know it. So why is it still so difficult to wake them up? Why?

As much as we are lead to believe, innovation is rarely straightforward and understandable. We think we get it from a TED talk or a trendy book, but it’s essentially the same as learning paragliding through YouTube. No one serious would recommend that. When I need people to understand innovation there are tricks and shortcuts. I use them to try to spark a ‘A-HA’ moment —a symptom that you can shift away from your usual canned understanding of the matter to something entirely different. One such shortcut is asking « When will the next Star Wars be shot on iPhone? »

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How to deal with startup fever in your company, part 1

Most corporations that have missed the so-called digital revolution, try to medicate with startups. In many cases this is both silly and dangerous. Let’s try to be smarter about this widespread startup fever…

While the first wave of the digital revolution is now well over, most corporations are victims of some level of rude awakening. Surprisingly enough for me, the sovereign cure for their lack of strategic vision has been isolated: startups. As it seems, six-month-old post-internet companies without cash-flow are deemed better than multi-billion global businesses are figuring out the market. Even if you might be very lucid about this foolishness, some of your executive committee is already victim of such startup fever. Let me offer one of the many ways to deal with that issue. And then maybe, you’ll find realreasons to work with startups.

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Building corporate incubation with Monty Hall

Running a corporate incubation program is not like operation a product pipeline. It’s an uncertain, probabilistic endeavor. Can you wrap your mind around it or do would just prefer to go through the motions blindly?

A few days ago, I was discussing how wrapping your head around the Monty Hall problem could help you better understand the importance of failure in innovation. If you take it a step further today, we could argue that most corporate incubation programs should be build around this probabilistic calculation.

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35 Ways self-driving vehicles are happening before 2020

A majority of automotive industry incumbents still bet on the (very) slow maturation of self-driving vehicles. Of course they can only think about personal cars…

The key argument of doubters on how fast the self-driving vehicles will go live is risk and the social acceptability (or the lack thereof) of deaths from vehicles making choices on their own. Truth to be told, yes, social acceptability is a steep barrier to entry for adopting technologies at large scale. You should nonetheless remember that innovation is not a clean decisive strike either, its death of the status quo by a thousand cuts.

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Dealing with failure in innovation and the Monty Hall problem

Failure when you innovate is totally acceptable. At least in books and on the internet. In real life, within your business this is a widely different story. Risk is only acceptable when you end up successful… Very successful. This usually demonstrates how poorly we manage risk…

Innovation literature is flooded with various arguments on why and how you should take risk as a company. As someone who’s depending on the success of the companies I work with (sometimes I even presume much more than their own management), I can’t avoid being one of these risk evangelist. The problem essentially is always the same. Risk is waved on principles as a good thing supported by plethoras of well-thinking weak sauce arguments. Inevitably, all these arguments are swiftly shelved when real work needs to be done.

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Understanding the new network effects

Innovative companies have been relying more and more on network effects to aggressively spread transformative market changes. This strategy has many forms and is still dramatically evolving. Do you understand its most recent developments?

Understanding network effects has been the underlying driver of the software revolution sparked less than a decade ago. And as always with innovation, as soon as we think we start to grasp it, it already morphes into something new. In our case, new network effects appear and we barely start to grasp them.

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Trading risks keynote

If you’re in Darmstadt on May 17th, you can join me and the wonderful team of the Merck Innovation Center at 5:30pm for a keynote on Trading Risks. We’ll discuss how startups and multinationals should recalibrate their relationships after years of fumbling around, and why building no-bullshit synergies matters more than ever.

Follow this link for further details.

Let’s grab a sake in Tokyo

I’ll be in Tokyo from May 22 to 26. As usual, I’ll be working with customers, but if you’re around this is also a good time to grab a coffee or a bite and exchange on business, innovation or other things. Just connect with me on Twitter or through the ‘Contact us’ menu above. I might also have spare time for a keynote or an event in case you’d be interested.

How to explain your business

We tend to use overly complex or simplistic tools to design or assess businesses. The middle-road of simple to understand, yet weaponized tools is always hard to get to. Ask any any executive or entrepreneur to explain his company and you usually get a mess.

Two weeks in Shanghai working with dozens of MBA students holding managerial and executive positions in various industries always ground me back to the basics of business. One of the most basic questioning that managers, innovators, or would-be entrepreneurs are asked is: can you explain your business? The answer is always a mess.

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