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Strategy

How to get from insight to market in a complex, sometimes chaotic, fast-moving world.

If you’re selling mattresses online, are you a startup?

If you’re selling mattresses online, are you a startup?

We idealize startups as young (start-), fast-growing companies (-up) that innovate with new technology. In Europe, most of the startups you meet don’t grow fast. And to be clear, fast would ‘just’ mean reaching the first million euros in sales within a year or two. Such speed usually requires

microsoft original surface table

Innovation doesn’t fit in a pipeline

Most of the innovation programs that I encounter are still organized as R&D programs. We often call that the innovation pipeline fallacy. It's primarily due to the fact that most organizations don't get that innovation is not R&D and that consecutively innovation

has you estée lauder weibo

Western brands still misjudge Chinese market

I’m still in the ongoing process of waking up a few of my customers (and the readers of this blog) on why the Chinese market is such a specific and fast one. Three years ago, I was pointing the inexorable move of the Chinese government toward clean energies, and

Facebook Portal - Innovation Copilots

Platforms’ Dark Patterns: Facebook Portal

In June, I was writing about « Platforms’ Dark Patterns » as a cautionary forecast on how the GAFA / BATX will evolve to sustain their constant push for pervasiveness in our daily lives. Today, Facebook announced « Portal,» an always-on connected home camera to keep in contact with family and friends… through the

Apple Watch Series 1 - innovation copilots

Understanding the Apple Watch

Understanding the Apple Watch is hard. In September 2014, Jean-Claude BIVER, President of LVMH Watchmaking Division (Tag Heuer, Zenith, Hublot), famously said: This [Apple] watch has no sex appeal. It’s too feminine and looks too much like the smartwatches already on the market. To be totally honest, it looks

😱 Are we still learning anything new about startups, or are we just pretending from now on?

😱 Are we still learning anything new about startups, or are we just pretending from now on?

After years of working with every kind of startup program — read: incubators, accelerators, tech clusters, public tech transfer, universities, entrepreneurs’ networks, corporate platforms, and various EU initiatives — I keep asking myself: are we still learning anything new about startups? For early stage startups, there are basically only three things to

Nintendo Switch

You’re not competing on products

A powerful statement from Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie FILS-AIME about what business they are in and who they are competing against: He counted the exact number of minutes per day and said that outside of the time a consumer spends eating, sleeping, working, and going to school,