Low-Risk, High-Reward Innovation

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wharton professor David Robertson discusses a "third way" to innovate besides disruptive and sustaining innovations. He outlines this approach through the examples of companies including LEGO, GoPro, Victoria's Secret, USAA, and CarMax. It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work as a system to carry out a single strategy. Robertson's the author of "The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation."

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.
0:32.8	I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:35.2	Imagine that it's 2005, and you work at a big camera company
0:38.6	like Nikon or Sony.
0:40.9	You're in a room with a bunch of other managers trying to come up with your next blockbuster product,
0:45.3	but your ideas seem so small and incremental. Do consumers really want more megapixel?
0:52.0	Then there are the ideas that are disruptive, but it's hard
0:54.7	to imagine your company really achieving them, like some better way to share cell phone
0:58.8	photos using the internet. Now fast forward a year. It's 2006 and someone has just handed you a first generation
1:06.0	GoPro video camera. It's not a revolutionary product. It's small, simple sturdy, and it uses existing technology.
1:14.4	But you can immediately see that this changes the game.
1:17.4	And it does.
1:18.4	Within 10 years, this company will grow to 1..6 billion in annual revenues.
1:24.5	So now the $1.6 billion question, why didn't your company think of that?
1:30.6	It wasn't an incremental product improvement, but it wasn't a huge disruptive innovation either.
1:36.0	Here to help us get better at thinking through these kinds of ideas is our guest today, David Robertson.
1:42.0	He's a professor of practice at the Wharton School at the University of
	...

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