Thoughts & Insights on Industries and Trends
Creating a Children’s Book with Elementary Students and Teachers
How our Design Strategist, Anthony DeThomas, used design thinking to write and publish a children’s book, My Friend Failure.
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4 Tactics for Navigating Risk
Corporate Innovation Groups (CIGs) are often on “offense” when it comes to new product development and technological innovation, particularly when it comes to engaging the market and mitigating market-facing risks.
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The Power of Analogies
It can be difficult to shift away from your conventional way of thinking; at Peer Insight we often use analogies to help stimulate our thinking and get the creative juices flowing in brainstorming sessions.
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From Possibility to Profitability: Next Level AI
How design thinking and entrepreneurship can move us from possibilities to profitability in artificial intelligence.
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Our Top Takeaways so Far | Part 3
We're nearing the end of our listening tour and have talked to over a dozen corporate innovation group leaders in financial services, manufacturing, insurance, healthcare and more. We’ve taken a step back to “sensemake” what we’ve heard so far, starting with a...
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Tour Podcast Episode 2
Tune in with Clay Maxwell to get a sneak peak at the themes and musings the team is sensemaking so far on the tour. How do innovation groups build resilience and what does it mean to them? Clay dives deep on this question and others as he reflects on learnings he's...
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AI=IA, Intelligence Augmentation as an opportunity rather than a threat
Much has been said about the disruptive potential held within artificial intelligence (and this is not a new debate). I’d love to focus less on the terminator-style disruption that some say will come with sentient machines and more on the presumably much closer at hand disruption from the rapidly broadening array of automated tasks. Rather than envisioning catastrophe scenarios, what opportunities are present in this new capability set?
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Listening Tour Takeaways | Part 2
Last week we sat down with a VP of Innovation & New Business Development at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company, an Innovation Venture Manager at a top insurance company, and a Strategy Manager responsible for innovation at an international non-profit. We’re...
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Tour Podcast Episode 1
We sat down with Natalie to do a quick debrief on what she and Clay have heard so far. Natalie and Clay - our listening tour guides - just got back from a week of conversations with innovation leaders in San Francisco. Natalie shares anecdotes from folks about their...
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Setting up for Success in Innovation – Use the VC Mindset
This has become a technique we’ve returned to again and again recently, in order to solve one of the more wicked problems we reliably encounter in pursuit of innovation (especially in slow-moving, scaled organizations), so I wanted to share it and seek builds.One of...
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Listening Tour Takeaways | Part 1
We kicked off our listening tour last week in San Francisco! We’ve had just a handful of conversations, so it’s too early to make any formal conclusions. However, we heard some really interesting insights and anecdotes from corporate innovation leaders that we...
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Listening Tour Interview Stimuli
One of the biggest things we hope to learn through this listening tour are the critical elements required to build and sustain a successful corporate innovation group (CIG). To get at that question, we designed a simple, interactive activity that asks our interviewees to plot a number of optional CIG elements (yellow “cards”) against two dimensions: risk and rigidity.
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The Business of Behavior Change — 5 Principles to Follow
Above, the Ansoff Matrix was adapted by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff in an HBR article titled Managing Your Innovation Portfolio.They posit (building on a concept offered by Larry Page at Google) that innovation resources should be proportionally (to the risk) allocated...
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How do innovation teams help promising concepts transition to the core business for scale-up?
This is one of the most difficult challenges facing large enterprises. It’s one thing to launch a new product within an existing line of business. That process is well understood. Breakthrough growth, however, demands that we continually explore ways to reinvent the...
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Now That You Have a Concept, Should You Make or Stake?
Many of the clients we work with face an all-too-familiar scenario: they’ve created a robust process for generating a number of high-potential opportunities to drive growth, yet the path to build those high-potential opportunities isn’t well paved. In fact, it has...
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Remove Failure From Your Innovation Lexicon
The notion “Fail Fast” has become rather pervasive throughout the world of corporate innovation and the more I hear it, the more I become sure that it is contributing to waste in the innovation ecosystem. Given its intention to inspire pragmatic experimentation, I’d...
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The Art of Experimentation – A Hierarchy of Prototypes
When asked, “What’s the background of your team?” in addition to “incredibly diverse” I’ll say, “At the end of the day, everyone on our team is a brilliant designer of experiments.” That is, they’re more than problem-solving consultants and/or generative designers,...
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How to Set Price: 10 Steps That Will Reveal the Right Price for Your New Offering
As we help firms introduce new, breakthrough services and experiences, there comes a moment that can feel like the first day of school: Pricing.No matter how much preparation has come before, the venture team can suddenly feel uncertain, anxious, and wracked with...
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