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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How to Make a Region Innovative - Booz&Co

A great new paper from Booz&Co on how to foster economic growth via innovation clusters that need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

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Why Some Think P&G's Innovation Is Slipping | Jack Neff - Advertising Age

Tucked in an area north of Cincinnati is an office-warehouse building that looks like a movie set. It contains fully functional mockups of two homes (one upper-middle class, one lower-income) complete with kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms. It has two mock grocery stores and a virtual-reality lab where you can fly over store shelves. And, just like a front operation in a spy thriller, the complex is innocuously called BRI Research -- to avoid letting consumers know that they're involved in studies for Procter & Gamble. This is the Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, or BRIC, in P&G parlance. And P&G, whose innovation record has come under growing scrutiny, hopes it can deliver. Analysts and investors are decidedly unimpressed with P&G these days.

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Innovation Hell: Saving Good Ideas From Premature Death - Visualised | Fast Company

Why is it that so many ideas grow weaker in the process that is theoretically designed to bring them to life? It's a painful but true phenomena (also, a very bad indicator of a company culture, if your goal is to survive and not become yesterday's news). Innovation is the heaven and hell of every brand’s journey. Inspired insight and passion fuel innovation’s potential, while committees have the wonderful legacy of killing potential greatness faster than a roomful of politicians. Or worse, a committee of politicians.

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Creativity Does Not Equal Innovation

Innovation and Creativity are words that are at times used interchangeably in the research and development process, but they have two distinct meanings. While creativity is about coming up with the big idea, innovation is about executing the idea and making it a business success. Do not confuse the two. An organization can certainly have creativity without the right steps to implement innovation.

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