Data, Digital, Discovery - the Future of Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle

Two recent examples show how digital disruption is having a huge impact on traditional businesses and business models and how rapidly innovation as a practice and process will need to change to keep up with the impact. Over the last two years, one of Australia’s largest publicly owned talent management organizations has seen one of its major client’s spend fall from A$30million per annum to $15million per annum, with expectations the total spend year ending 2012 will be around $5million. For any company this is a huge drop in revenue and as the Managing Director said “It is not only a huge drop in revenue for us, it is a huge drop in revenue for the total HR industry in Australia.” This contraction has come about because of the disruption and emergence of digital technology in the HR market, specifically LinkedIn.

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A New Model for Mentoring Startups in Emerging Markets - Linda Rottenberg’s High-Impact Endeavor

A great new piece from strategy and business.

Growing up in one of Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas, Heloísa Helena Assis realized that there was enormous demand for an affordable product that would tame Brazilian women’s unruly curls. In 1993, Assis and her partners — a former nanny, a cabdriver, and a McDonald’s employee — started a business called Beleza Natural (“Natural Beauty”) in the basement of a modest house in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The company was an immediate success. Beleza Natural was soon scrambling to keep up with demand, unsure of how to pursue strategic growth with limited funding. Now she’s replicating it around the world.

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One Giant Leap to Nowhere - Tom E Wolfe's Great Story on Poor Strategic Innovation | NYTimes.com

WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA. Enlarge This Image The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon. It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority. Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11.

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Big innovation needs ‘Big Data’ - FT.com

‘Big data’ is all the rage, and for good reason. Companies need to sort through tons of it to understand what products their customers really want, and what they will buy. After all, their future depends on it. Yet, in spite of vast amounts of market intelligence and virtually unlimited information, how well do companies really know their customer? In a world where, according to the Association of Product Management and product Marketing, more than 50 per cent of new technology products that enter the market fail, and roughly 75 per cent of consumer packaged goods and retail products fail to earn even $7.5m during their first year, we are clearly not doing a good job putting this data to work.

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How to Tell Your Story for Impact - A Great Lecture on Communication and Presentation - JD Schramm - Stanford University

JD Schramm, Stanford Graduate School of Management has a reassuring message for anyone ? and that includes just about everyone, really -- who frets over the prospect of public speaking. "The beautiful thing about communication is that it is part art and part science," he told a recent gathering at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While some people are naturally gifted storytellers, "there are strategies that each of us can employ to work for us." Schramm, a lecturer in organizational behavior who also directs the business school's Mastery in Communication Initiative, gave advice to a dozen of the school's alumni in advance of an Oct. 20 celebration of the school's commitment to developing leaders who can address the social and environmental issues of their times. For the occasion, the school's Center for Social Innovation and its 40-year-old Public Management Program have asked alumni social innovators to participate in "Class Notes Live" sessions. The participants in Schramm's workshop are among a larger group who will tell, in just four minutes each, their personal stories of impact. Schramm's job was to get them ready. His first piece of advice:

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