Innovation Articles from March 2024

What Went Wrong at Techstars – Chris DeVore

• “This post offers an insiders’ view of some of the key strategic decisions that led to Techstars’ decline.”

20 Ways to Use GPTs (custom versions of ChatGPT) at Work – Lenny Rachitsky

• Lenny outlines 20 examples of how people are using custom GPTs to make their teams more productive, such as refining copy to setting goals to scoring customer needs.

A Love Letter to Public Libraries – 34th Street

• “On the surface, libraries are intellectual spaces for education and scholarship. But, they’re also centers for culture and community, and a prime example of the ever–rarer “ third place.” In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term, which refers to spaces other than the home and the workplace. “Third places” encompass pubs and cafes, parks and theaters, churches and gyms and more. But why write about these places? Oldenburg argues that they are crucial to human flourishing; it’s in these more informal, neutral settings that strangers cross paths and community thrives.”

Your First 100 Days On The Innovation Job (and Beyond) – Alexander Osterwalder

• “We advise new innovation leaders to get three things done when they start. Firstly, understand the company’s growth and innovation objectives as well as its innovation maturity. Secondly, immediately start building alliances to eliminate innovation blockers and establish enablers. Thirdly, outline your innovation objectives and how you will achieve them.”

The 5 Best Apple Vision Pro XR Use Cases for Brands – Press Start

• Press Start’s XL Newsletter looks at five use cases for Apple Visio Pro, including Storyliving, XR Video, Mini Games, XR Shopping, and Brand Butlers.

Four More Impactful Innovation Articles

From Empathy to Scale: What Stage Are You Really At? – Focused Chaos

• “Big companies often don’t go through the fundamentals in a rigorous way because they believe their scale will solve any issues that emerge. Big companies, especially legacy ones (that have been around for a long time) under-value the Empathy and Stickiness stages and over-value the Virality and Revenue stages, often attempting to leapfrog the early stages to grow as quickly as possible. It rarely works.”

Disruption Comes to Google – Dare Obasanjo

• “The tech industry is extremely dynamic and the only constant is change. Companies that once appeared to be invulnerable can be regularly upset by upstarts unless they adapt. We can see this in the difference in fortunes between Microsoft and Intel which both saw the PC displaced by mobile devices. Microsoft adapted by pivoting to the cloud while Intel’s fortunes have declined as ARM, TSMC and Nvidia are ascendant. Google is facing similar potential disruption in its core search business due to the rise of answer engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.”

Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation – Human-Centered Change and Innovation

• “While increasing diversity in general increases performance, there is also evidence that women specifically have a major impact. In fact, in one wide ranging study, in which researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon sought to identify a general intelligence score for teams, they not only found that teams that included women got better results, but that the higher the proportion of women was, the better the teams did.”

The Benefits of Innovation That Isn’t Disruptive – HBR

• “Disruption is not the only path to innovation and growth. Creation without disruption or nondisruptive creation is about creating a new market outside or beyond existing industry boundaries, and has its own organizational and business advantages. In this article, the authors outline four advantages to opting for this nondisruptive route: 1) It allows you to avoid direct confrontations with established incumbents. 2) It is an effective way to respond to full-on disruption. 3) It makes it easier to secure support from internal stakeholders. 4) It largely avoids backlash from external stakeholders.”

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