Iterating Design & Management (to a lesser extent)

The Wharton researchers find that the Long Tail effect holds true in some cases, but when factoring in expanding product variety and consumer demand, mass appeal products retain their importance. The researchers argue that new movies appear so fast that consumers do not have time to discover them, and that niche movies are not any more well-liked than hits.

Balancing Hard and Soft

In every company, there are really two organizations at work: the formal and the informal. The formal organization is the default governing structure of most large companies founded in the past century. Businesspeople recognize the formal organization as that rational construct that runs on rules, operates through hierarchies and programs, and evaluates performance by the numbers. If you have been trained in the “hard” disciplines like finance, technology, or operations — as so many senior managers have — you have probably learned to operate naturally in the formal domain, deploying tangible factors like job descriptions, organization charts, process flows, and scorecards.

Whether it’s Van Phillips designing the Cheetah prosthetic foot or Deborah Adler redesigning prescription medicine bottles, many of the designers I studied went through the same basic steps:
- Questioning the existing reality;
- Envisioning that which does not exist;
- Using lateral thinking, to connect unrelated ideas;
- Experimenting and prototyping.

http://glimmersite.com/2010/04/22/from-fuse-a-journey-inside-the-design-mind/headline/

I think incremental business model innovation is the same as executing a good strategy. Apple has just posted a stellar 90% increase in profit and much of this growth is based on a suite of products closely related to each other and not to far from the business model that Apple has had for a few years now. The strategy is well thought out and successfully planned and implemented. However, I think that strategy and business model innovation diverges when we talk about radical business model innovation. Why? Because strategy is still based upon conventional thinking about planning, prediction and measurement. Moving to very different business models needs the tools and concepts from innovation management rather than predictions and plans from strategy textbooks.

Is Business Model Innovation Just Another Name for Strategy?

Turning Designs into Businesses
A competition in conjunction with the CIA Spring Design Show

For the second consecutive year the Weatherhead School of Management is hosting the Cleveland Institute of Art Spring Design Show, which will take place from April 18th to April 21st. The event, which features the work of over 100 Industrial, Interior and Communication Design students, contains hundreds of ideas that represent the seeds of future business ventures.

This show represents a unique opportunity to develop and exercise skills associated with identifying business opportunities and working in a multidisciplinary fashion. We are announcing a competition in which MBA students are encouraged to identify a particular CIA project that they think has business potential and develop a brief prospectus to describe how that potential could be realized.