Of interest: a new interview in Innovations magazine with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm and his new book Dealing with Darwin) is available for download here. Moore’s new book takes a look at how innovation alone is not enough… “Innovation also requires an investment strategy that puts your resources where they count, and a people strategy that aligns those resources with the best skills of all your employees.”
An interesting viewpoint in the interview:
Q: How can companies reignite their growth engines?
Moore: “You have to self-fund. But where are you going to get the resources? My view is that you have to extract resources from context to repurpose for core.
“I’ll give you an example. Right now, Microsoft is getting beaten up. Everyone is saying Google is winning the IQ awards, and Microsoft is brain-dead. The reason why Microsoft is in such trouble is they have to put all their resources into their two franchises, Windows and Office. But
Darwin says no. You have to continue to meet the revenue commitments of those context franchises, but you have to do it with fewer resources, so that you can take some resources and spend them on core, on whatever type of innovation will work for you. This is how they did manufacturing at Cisco Systems. They centralized it, they standardized it, they modularized it, they optimized it, and then they outsourced it.”