innovation copilots (Page 3)

innovation copilots

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💥 Peacetime vs. Wartime innovation?

/ Culture and Leadership

💥 Peacetime vs. Wartime innovation?

If you think The Godfather II would be the worst possible source to find the proper inspiration for strategy and innovation, I'd be with you. That being said, the movie has an interesting line of dialogue between Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen, his half-brother of sorts and family attorney. When

🦖 Why AI will be the new dominant business model

/ Business models and Strategy

🦖 Why AI will be the new dominant business model

With the seemingly sudden rise of artificial intelligence as the new thing that no one saw coming ('sigh'), there are vast amounts of media reports, business theories, and plain drama that use words like "revolution," "disruption," "breakthrough," "obsolescence" or even "apocalypse." But, conveniently, very few parties take the time to

🎱 The second-order consequences of the pandemic

🎱 The second-order consequences of the pandemic

Now that we might start to believe that the Covid-19 pandemic is mostly behind us, we certainly want to think that everything is back to normal; whatever normal was three years ago. But it's not, and we aren't. What generally eludes us is the second-order consequences of any transformational event.

🤖 Using an AI mirror to check your brand

Among the gazillions of new applications that ChatGPT is currently offering, one that I've found quite amusing (and efficient) is checking how good your marketing is. How to do that? Simply by asking the AI to explain back to you your tagline, missions statement, or the name of your company:

📺 What is operational excellence

/ Culture and Leadership

📺 What is operational excellence

We always actively talk about how culture eats strategy for breakfast and how understanding the underlying way an organization processes decisions is critical when dealing with critical market changes. This notion of 'culture' and its 'importance' is never met with resistance. It is probably because it wouldn't seem right to

🔨 Design thinking is a tool, not a process

🔨 Design thinking is a tool, not a process

I have already expressed my doubts a few times about innovation methodologies that are both all-encompassing and self-contained. The fabulous five-step methodologies that get you from A to E flawlessly and can solve all your seemingly inscrutable problems are, at best, overly optimistic but mostly cheap grifts. If you missed

💵 What Tesla's new pricing strategy signals

/ Business models and Strategy

💵 What Tesla's new pricing strategy signals

Tesla fans might not like it, but from a pure design and "car" perspective, Tesla is the care from the future... as it was imagined twenty years ago (read: they lost their edge and are very much dated regarding what is offered by competitors). What we still overlook, though, is

🤘 We now have a podcast (kind of)

🤘 We now have a podcast (kind of)

I've been teasing that for a few days, but let's say we are officially experimenting with a podcast version of our articles. To be clear, Stéphanie and I have been struggling with this idea for months as we don't have the material time to record things. We also have a

❌ Are we past social media?

❌ Are we past social media?

Facebook has been losing steam for years, and now Instagram has also started to feel stale. Twitter has objectively devolved into a toxic cesspool, and Mastodon feels like a half-backed, overly cumbersome platform. As innovators, we feel in our bones that such a market is ripe for new entrants, if

📦 Pricing technology

📦 Pricing technology

When dealing with innovation, a constant issue is being able to get out of the product mindset. As most decision-makers come from a marketing, financial, or engineering background, the default mode is thinking of price, product, promotion, etc. Something doesn't sell? Lower the price! Still not working? Promote more aggressively!

🧐 B2C Is always harder...

🧐 B2C Is always harder...

When you're working in startup mode, one of your core missions (if not a unique mission) is to understand the problem you want to solve for your market. And I've been repeating for eternity that it's somehow easy in B2B, while B2C is always fantastically more complicated. The reason essentially

🤑 Is TikTok a propaganda machine? It's certainly a cash machine.

🤑 Is TikTok a propaganda machine? It's certainly a cash machine.

TikTok has been, for a few years, the center stage of heated debates about being a Chinese propaganda machine in the West. The irony of American tech companies and social networks pointing the finger on how TikTok could sabotage democracies when the January 6 committee is still trying to figure

🍎 The Lisa is 40 years old, and we still misread it as a failure

/ Business models and Strategy

🍎 The Lisa is 40 years old, and we still misread it as a failure

You probably heard many stories about Apple's Lisa historical flop. Launched in January 1983 at a 5x to 7x price point above the best-selling IBM PCs of the time, Lisa was discontinued in 1986 (its remaining inventory was famously buried in a Utah landfill to justify a tax write-off). The

🍔 Understanding the slump in an innovation market as a positive signal

/ Business models and Strategy

🍔 Understanding the slump in an innovation market as a positive signal

In a previous newsletter, I addressed some misconceptions about timing market entrance for innovations. 🟢 Timing technology push and market pull for incubation programsOne of the most requested frameworks I often have from corporate customers is how Gartner’s hype and innovation diffusion work together. To my knowledge, this is weirdly

🤫 The shop that didn't need a website

🤫 The shop that didn't need a website

One of the shops in our cozy city of Haarlem sells high-end HiFi. As I pushed the door for the first time a few years ago, I was surprised at the really exceptional brands they had in store. The friendly owner was surprised too. He politely asked if I had

🤖 The digital native myth

🤖 The digital native myth

Today, a quick note for future reference as I still hear a lot of marketers still strategizing about "digital natives." The digital native demography is a common target of many incumbent companies trying to get more into digital. How to address the digital natives effectively has been the main theme

💳 An Amazon-like store without market awareness

💳 An Amazon-like store without market awareness

Since a few months ago, the supermarket chain Aldi has been testing a fully automated checkout-free store in Utrecht and London (Aldi Shop & Go). This is a classic but always interesting move of prototyping at scale technology to understand how your market reacts to it and, most importantly, if there's

🤢 The U.S. army doesn't think VR is ready, either

🤢 The U.S. army doesn't think VR is ready, either

Being mostly bearish on VR, I'm still monitoring a few reasonably useful applications. Among them, there is the U.S. army Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems (IVAS) initiative, promising to equip the "soldier of the future" with enhanced capabilities such as: * Allowing soldiers in the back of fighting vehicles to have

📺 A fire chat discussion about tech, the U.S., Europe, design, and a few other things

📺 A fire chat discussion about tech, the U.S., Europe, design, and a few other things

In 2019, I was having a 'fire chat" discussion as I was the host of the tech conference Blend Web Mix in Lyon (France) to debrief many of the topics that were addressed on stage for two days. And I know it's kind of old news. But I wanted to