Articles Review

1. Bridging the Gap between Stewards and Creators

Clashes between bottom line-oriented managers (stewards) and creative technical employees
(creators) may be inevitable. But when those conflicts aren’t managed well, a company’s
ability to innovate may be at risk.
For instance, when a software developer becomes a development manager, or a genetics
researcher becomes a research manager — the specialized field in which value creation
occurs keeps moving forward. A software developer more than four or five years removed
from actual coding is no longer expert. With the exception of a few remarkable individuals,
most managers can’t keep up with all the details of advancing technology while also having
full-time management responsibilities.
This wouldn’t be a significant problem if managers and specialized employees always saw
eye to eye. In a study we conducted on innovation in the development of the Internet, we
found evidence of disputes and misunderstandings between the people whom we
call stewards (usually managers) and others we call creators (usually specialized, highly
capable employees) which can cause delays in business adoption of new technologies.
Stewards care most about allocating resources efficiently and responsibly. Creators, in
contrast, care most for the glittering vision and higher purpose, and they often see business
concerns as secondary. In such situations, a company’s ability to innovate effectively may be
at risk.
In reality, managers’ inclination to restrain creator tendencies rather than pay attention to
them sometimes may pose a danger to a business. On the other hand, creators aren’t always
right, either. Some activities of creators — such as a star programmer who pursues a pet
technical project while the company is facing a critical, looming deadline that needs his full
attention — are surely counterproductive. 
Eight guidelines for reducing the potentially destructive impact of steward-creator conflict
are as follows

 Keep creators around

 Balance influence between stewards and creators – Appreciate creators
 Cultivate bridging personalities
 Use peer review to provide more accurate evaluation
 Structure the innovation process to regularly produce tangible artefacts.
 Realize that there will always be some conflict
 Avoid overly prescriptive control mechanisms.
 Manage the rate of convergence on closure
2. “Intrapreneurship and the Reinvention of the Corporation”,
Business Horizons May-June 1988
In the industrial society of the past, efficiency was the determinant of success. Efficiency is
achieved through the application of scientific methods to management problems. As long as
there is a reasonable amount of competition, efficiency will remain important. Efficiency,
however, is not enough to ensure corporate survival and prosperity. In fact, adaptability has
become so much a part of the environmental demands of some industries that firms in those
industries are forced into a never-ending process of change that is as important as efficiency.
Yogis are good with ideas. The~ have vision and insights but usually~ have trouble staying
on schedules executing plans. Rarely, if ever, they meet a payroll. Yet, they are the, essential
developers of ideas that hell corporations adapt to the demands c an uncertain future.
Commissars lack a great deal of vision, but they can set goals, implement plans, get the job
done, and keep the corporation in the black--at least in the short run. Seldom is an abundance
of both attributes found in a single person.
The Intrapreneur--that unique individual who is both yogi and commissar, the 'dreamer who
does'---is the latest figment of the business journalist'~ imagination. Intemally, a firm must
become organized and build a culture conducive to intrapreneurship. It must have a strategic
commitment to encouraging creative people and a means of integrating their ideas into
corporate strategy if and when innovation results.
In practice, if intrapreneurs are to develop in a corporation, several specific strategic moves
must be made. The CEO and other high-level managers must make frequent public
statements reinforcing the importance of innovation to the firm, When formal goal-setting
systems such as MBO are used, creativity and innovation must be given high priority for
concrete and symbolic reasons, Reward systems must be designed to encourage innovation,
Top management must recognize that creative people are driven as much or more by the ethic
of creation as by the ethic of competition.
Tradishtional reward systems in corporations are designed for people who enjoy money,
power, and status. These things, however, are rarely strong motivators to intrapreneurs.
Intrapreneurs need freedom to create, not more responsibility in managing old ideas. If they
become managers in mature, cash-cow operations, they can create disaster by tinkering with
something that is not broken. Intracapital is another word for a discretionary budget with no
time limit on its expenditure. It is literally money in the bank, available on request. What will
intracapital buy? Nothing outside the
Intrapreneurs should be expected to assume some potential risks. This could mean the
corporation and the individual enter into a risk contract in which each understands the risks
assumed by all parties. All parties should understand how success will be measured and how
profits and costs will be defined. This includes any and all aspects of transfer pricing and
allocation of overhead. The method of allocating profits from all ventures should be
understood and accepted. It should include. The corporation and the intrapreneur must look at
the contract more as a moral than a legal commitment. Intrapreneuring is founded on
confidence and trust.

3. The Five Stages of Successful Innovation

The article talks about how very few companies have a defined process in place for
innovation
The various stages for innovation are as follows :

 Idea generation and mobilization: The very first step wherein an idea is floated with
both a pressure to compete and by the freedom to explore.
 Advocacy and screening: In this stage the pros and cons are weighed and ideas
which lack potential are weeded out. This step is necessary as you don't want to pitch
ideas to the stakeholders without due deliberation.
 Experimentation: The experimentation stage tests the sustainability of ideas for a
particular organization at a particular time and in a particular environment. In this
stage, it’s important to determine who the customer will be and what he or she will
use the innovation for.
 Commercialization: In the commercialization stage, the organization looks to its
customers to verify that the innovation actually solves their problems and then
analyze the costs and benefits of rolling out the innovation.
 Diffusion and implementation: Diffusion is the process of gaining final,
companywide acceptance of an innovation, and implementation is the process of
setting up the structures, maintenance and resources needed to produce it.

4. Managing Innovation in Small Worlds

The article throws light on the fact that research proved innovators were on the move,
switching jobs with greater frequency as opposed to how it was historically where they would
work in isolation in a company. Such environments provide both strategic opportunity and
potential threat. They can increase creativity within a company, but they also hasten the
diffusion of creative knowledge to other firms through personnel and knowledge transfer.
Managers intuition in identifying gatekeepers should be reasonably accurate. They should be
wary of gatekeepers who aggressively control information and also the unskilled gatekeepers
who generate unfiltered, prioritized lists of ideas ultimately making the gatekeeper less
effective.
Managers need to be realistic about their abilities to retain gatekeepers. Like star athletes,
gatekeepers are usually adept at exploiting opportunities, both within and outside of their
current companies. Such are the new dynamics of innovation in a small world, in which
knowledge flows freely and talent seeks opportunity.
 5. The Era of Open Innovation in MIT Sloan Management Review
Today, in many industries, the logic that supports an internally oriented, centralized approach
to research and development (R&D) has become obsolete. Useful knowledge has become
widespread and ideas must be used with alacrity. Such factors create a new logic of open
innovation that embraces external ideas and knowledge in conjunction with internal R&D.
This change offers novel ways to create value. However, companies must still perform the
difficult and arduous work necessary to convert promising research results into products and
services that satisfy customers’ needs. Innovators must integrate their ideas, expertise and
skills with those of others outside the organization to deliver the result to the marketplace,
using the most effective means possible. In short, firms that can harness outside ideas to
advance their own businesses while leveraging their internal ideas outside their current
operations will likely thrive in this new era of open innovation.

6. Why Good companies go bad in Harvard Business Review

One of the most common business phenomena is also one of the most perplexing: when
successful companies face big changes, they often fail to respond effectively. Many assume
that the problem is paralysis, but the real problem, according to Donald Sull, is active
inertia--an organization's tendency to persist in established patterns of behaviour. Most
leading businesses owe their prosperity to a fresh competitive formula--a distinctive
combination of strategies, relationships, processes, and values that sets them apart from the
crowd. But when changes occur in a company's markets, the formula that brought success
instead brings failure. Stuck in the modes of thinking and working that have been successful
in the past, market leaders simply accelerate all their tried-and-true activities. In attempting to
dig themselves out of a hole, they just deepen it. In particular, four things happen: strategic
frames become blinders; processes harden into routines; relationships become shackles; and
values turn into dogmas. To illustrate his point, the author draws on examples of pairs of
industry leaders, like Goodyear and Firestone, whose fates diverged when they were forced to
respond to dramatic changes in the tire industry. In addition to diagnosing the problem, Sull
offers practical advice for avoiding active inertia. Rather than rushing to ask, "What should
we do?" managers should pause to ask, "What hinders us?" That question focuses attention
on the proper things: the strategic frames, processes, relationships, and values that can
subvert action by channelling it in the wrong direction.
 7. Is It Real? Can We Win? Is It Worth Doing?”, HBR Dec 2007

Minor innovations make up most of a company's development portfolio on average, but they
never generate the growth companies seek. The solution, says Day--the Geoffrey T. Boisi
Professor of Marketing and a co-director of the Mack Centre for Technological Innovation at
Wharton--is for companies to undertake a systematic, disciplined review of their innovation
portfolios and increase the number of major innovations at an acceptable level of risk. Two
tools can help them do this. The first, called the risk matrix, graphically reveals the
distribution of risk across a company's entire innovation portfolio. The matrix allows
companies to estimate each project's probability of success or failure, based on how big a
stretch it is for the firm to undertake. The less familiar the product or technology and the
intended market, the higher the risk. The second tool, dubbed the R-W-W (real-win-worth it)
screen, allows companies to evaluate the risks and potential of individual projects by
answering six fundamental questions about each one: Is the market real? explores customers'
needs, their willingness to buy, and the size of the potential market. Is the product real? looks
at the feasibility of producing the innovation. Can the product be competitive? and Can our
company be competitive? investigate how well suited the company's resources and
management are to compete in the marketplace with the product. Will the product be
profitable at an acceptable risk? explores the financial analysis needed to assess an
innovation's commercial viability. Last, Does launching the product make strategic sense?
examines the project's fit with company strategy and whether management supports it.

8. Design Thinking”, HBR June 2008

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process
and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand
perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation's terrain expands to
encompass human-centred processes and services as well as products, companies are asking
designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president
of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking--a method
of meeting people's needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable
way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One
involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser
Permanente and Brown's firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser
hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid
prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information
exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care,
and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer
Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don't ride bikes.
The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the
complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked
roads had overshadowed people's happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a
brand concept--"Coasting"--to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new
in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a
reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting
bikes.

9. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” By Joseph L. Bower

and Clayton M. Christensen

This article talks about why large corporations lose to smaller emerging companies and the
risks of sticking to the customer needs. It is important to spot a disruptive technology. The
theory of disruptive technology is explained using a few cases like the hard disk drive
industry. The Author explains his views on disruptive technology and its significance by
taking a look at a fast paced industry with a long history of companies falling and rising to
the top spot in the market.

The article first takes a look at the current management and strategy planning of larger
corporations for their technological development. It has always been the norm to stick close
to ones customers in order to fulfill their needs and stay competitive in the market. Managers
who are looked upon to take risks and succeed based on their ability to stay competitive,
follow the voice of their customers because this is the safest way. However, this article talks
about this being a risk to the companies and managers opting this.
Understanding why these managers and companies do this allows can help us understand
how this strategy is detrimental to a company’s future. But it can also be said that the
managers are making the right choices given their situations. The large markets that these
companies supply rely closely on the sentiments of their customers and that is why these
large companies are reluctant to pay heed to emerging technologies that are not in-line with
their current customer’s needs. These disruptive technologies are also unattractive because at
the time of review they may not even have a broad enough potential market to make it worth
while for a company to pursue. However, these are judgments made from only a large
company’s perspective, and the author believes that a large company does not fully take into
consideration, a new technology’s potential.

A disruptive technology can be spotted and sought using a few key checkpoints. First, a
smaller company’s perspective must be used when assessing the potential of a technology. A
technology may only have a small market today, but may possess a market that exceeds the
market of the current company’s main client’s tomorrow. Second, asking the right people
about a new technology is the key. Asking current clients about a new technology is
misleading as disruptive technologies are not the ones that meet the current client’s needs.
Instead, this article suggests that a technology development graph should be drawn by asking
experts working with the technology to see if it will ever meet the existing client’s needs. The
inclination of the tech development curve is key. Finally, use smaller start up companies that
are independent from the larger company to find a market for this technology. This last aspect
is key for consistent development and growth of the disruptive technology. Many companies
find that smaller companies have a stronger desire and proximity to the technology to help it
grow. The author warns companies not to try and merge a smaller company when it succeeds
in bringing a technology into market, because the operating standards may vary and may be
premature and merging may lead to the death of the disruptive technology. Resource
allocation within the company may also prove challenging on the management front.

Finally, the article talks about the requirement of companies to be willing to allow disruptive
technologies into the business cycle. Fear of a technology cannibalizing their current business
will only lead them to failure in the end. It is these new technologies that will allow
companies a new future once their mainstream products reach the decline stage and meet the
end of their own life cycles.
 10. How to Kill Creativity

The hunt of productivity, control and efficiency in a corporate environment can kill
productivity. Creativity has three parts: expertise, flexible thinking and motivation. Extrinsic
motivators are not very effective in promoting creativity. Employees with firm intrinsic
motivation can create immediate results rather inexpensively.

Creative thinking refers to the capacity of people to approach problems and solutions and
their ability to put existing ideas together in new combinations. Business creativity requires
an idea to be appropriate, unique, fruitful and actionable. Managerial practices that encourage
creativity include: challenge, freedom, reasonable resources management, mutually
supportive work-group characteristics, supervisory encouragement, and organizational
support. Excessive infighting and politics kill creativity.
 Corporate Entrepreneurship at One Plus
OnePlus disrupting the smartphone industry with its unique marketing strategy. The brand
has gone on to capture 48% of the premium smartphone segment in India, giving tough
competition to biggies like Apple and Samsung.

❖ Belief in oneself

A newly born Chinese smartphone maker competing with the biggest mobile market players
like Samsung and Apple seemed illogical in the beginning. But as OnePlus’s intelligent
positioning as a powerful phone with every feature at the lowest price started to work, it
made everyone notice the brand. This brilliant positioning of every OnePlus phone made it
overcome the competition in a similar price bracket by offering more features at a nominal
price. The slogan “Never Settle” is aimed at a tech savvy audience that has good knowledge
about gadgets and wants better features from their smartphones.

❖ New methods of marketing

OnePlus’s unique invite-only marketing gimmick worked well for the brand. It created
curiosity and desirability in the audience for the phone by portraying it as something rare and
exclusive. The invite-only concept worked as a mouth to mouth campaign in itself and
increased awareness about the brand without increasing the ad budget on OnePlus’s
marketing efforts. Although the company’s brand ambassador is Amitabh Bachchan, he’s
prudently used in the brand’s communication.

❖ Understand the market

What makes OnePlus irresistible is not just the fact that it’s exclusive, but also that it is
pitched to a focused market. OnePlus’s target audience consists of tech savvy millennials.
The company focuses on giving customers more features while cutting back on advertising.
OnePlus is hugely leveraging social media to reach the youngsters. Visitors from Facebook,
Reddit and Twitter to the brand’s website comprises of nearly 8% of the entire traffic. Thanks
to the huge OnePlus community in India that prefers cost benefit over brand value, the
company is growing its market share in the country.