By Elijah Eilert Where do the dollars go – which ideas get the dosh? Who’s innovation project wins the funds? And more importantly why? The reality is, that in most cases the best storytellers win. The writers and the great politicians, those are not always the ones with the best ideas. This approach is [...]
By Tristan Kromer KPIs can kill you. Or at least it can kill your efforts to create a truly disruptive innovation. And I can’t think of a more deadly KPI than growth. Of course, growth is every company’s aspiration. There are revenue growth targets, market share growth targets, margin growth targets, and even simple [...]
By Tristan Kromer A lot of tours come through Silicon Valley full of CEOs, CTOs, and board members who want to figure out what makes the region tick. They want to see startups, hear thought leaders, and of course, have a glass of wine in Napa. These tours can be inspirational. But they don’t [...]
By Tristan Kromer Paid, retention, viral. Those are the three “engines of growth” suggested by Eric Ries in The Startup Way. Companies can pick one of the three to be great at, but they generally can’t manage more than that. Why? How do these engines work with your innovation strategy? How do they differ [...]
By Tristan Kromer Innovation Accounting sounds like one of those semi-humorous oxymorons like “accurate rumors,” “the rules of anarchy,” or “airline schedules.” Innovation sounds exciting! It’s about ideas and novelty. Things we’ve never seen before. It’s ambiguous and full of uncertainty. It’s mysterious and seems utterly unquantifiable. Accounting is the thing you dread doing at [...]
By Tristan Kromer More and more companies are jumping on the innovation bandwagon and starting their own innovation program. It could be in the form of an accelerator, an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley, or a full, lean digital transformation of the company’s core processes. But too many are falling into bad practices right [...]
By Tristan Kromer When people say they want to measure innovation or implement innovation accounting, they are often talking about a number of different things, and trying to answer a broad variety of questions: Is this team succeeding? Is this project going to succeed? How much money are we going to make? Is this [...]
By Elijah Eilert and Tristan Kromer Liebig’s Barrel When governments, corporations, and entrepreneurs start building innovation ecosystems, there’s a flurry of predictable activity. Create meetups! Start angel investor groups! Make sure we have social media accounts tweeting about entrepreneurship! But all this effort doesn’t necessarily lead to progress. The goal is to increase the [...]
