Thoughts & Insights
Your Pre-MVP Checklist
Do you have clarity on what to build, how to build, and what to test, before spending your first development dollar?Getting from opportunities to MVP is like navigating from an open sea of possibilities to picking the "right" stream that leads to the promised land....
Product Managers, Priorities, and Pandemics
Prioritizing product roadmaps in a pandemic: what’s now, next, later? We’ve been thinking about the product managers who are steering pre-commercial products into this head wind. There is a ‘survival’ mode to get through: reacting to external market shifts and...
5 Ways Leaders Are Responding to Covid-19
Over the past month, we've been in touch with several dozen growth leaders at large enterprises. Who better to navigate uncertainty, create rapid prototypes, and make effective pivots? Here is a snapshot of how they are responding to the pandemic. 1. Serve and...
Spotted: A Gap in Support Services for Startups (And a Solution – the Venture Studio!)
Today, there are a number of paths an early venture can go down to augment the skills that reside inside an organization with help from the outside. Of course, a startup can forgo outside help entirely and insource via the talents and capital of the founders alone —...
3 Steps for Aligning Remote Teams to Move Forward Every Day
F:or many of us remote work or teleworking is a brand new reality. Even if we worked from home occasionally, having a full team working remotely is a new challenge to navigate. Some of us are finding out in real time all of the challenges and successes with this new...
Top 5 Missteps of Innovation Labs
A successful corporate innovation lab, incubator, or accelerator depends upon three things: people, people, and people. That’s what I learned by speaking with the heads of innovation labs at 12 Fortune 500 corporations over the course of eight weeks. These market...
A Look Inside Peer Insight’s Virtual Working Sessions
This video tour gives you an inside peek into how we design and execute virtual working sessions at Peer Insight.
The Design Brief: a North Star for Any Project
It’s easy to lose track of the big vision when you’re in the weeds of a project. That’s why it is important to have a Design Brief so it can help ground you and your team as the opportunity you’re tackling gets more wicked. Simply put, your Design Brief is a charter, the North Star, for your project.
How Virtual Research Can Move Your Challenge Forward
As you are figuring out your new normal, you have deadlines from leadership that still must be met. You’re likely trying to decide what to move forward, and how. And if you’re responsible for understanding customer needs to create or improve new products and...
7 Strategies to Accelerate Through Uncertainty
You thought you knew a thing or two about navigating uncertainty; racked up a few wins creating new revenue streams for your company, or new experiences for customers. But now the foundation underneath us has crumbled away. We now have even more uncertainty...in the...
How to Manage and Reduce Your Innovation Risk
In the world of venture capital, understanding and weighing risk is core to assessing any business opportunity. For corporate innovation, assessing risk is just as crucial, if not more: corporate innovation projects, or ventures, need to see success early, and early...
The Pinocchio Problem: Why Your Product Wishes It Could Be a Service
Pinocchio was a wooden puppet, carved by the shoemaker Geppeto, who wished he could be a boy. In the same way, your tangible product wishes it could be a service. Why? Being consumed as a service makes your product more than a collection of atoms. It becomes the...
Don’t Let Your Digital Transformation Efforts Get Stuck in the 90’s
(even though old habits die hard) Most newly appointed Chief Digital Officers or CTOS remember the 1990s well - they were earning their stripes while listening to Boyz II Men & Pearl Jam on the radio and CDs. The music might be different now, but this current tech...
Stop Slowing Down Your Innovation Projects
Disruption of markets worldwide has proven that speed is an important attribute of strong innovators. Companies that aren’t optimized for speed often don’t generate the returns on innovation and product development that they’re looking for; in fact, 42% of global...
10 Essentials for Starting a Venture
For many of the people we work with who launch new business ventures, our collaboration together is their first trip to Venture Island. “What’s the weather going to be like?” they often ask. After launching PX, our venture studio, it looks like we’ll be taking even...
What Manufacturing Leadership Looks Like in Industry 4.0
The steam engine and mechanical loom, mass production and commercial electricity, the personal computer and digital technology—these advances powered three industrial revolutions. Today, we’re in the midst of a fourth revolution. This one’s driven by cloud storage,...
The Future of Supply Chains and its Impact on Manufacturers and Retailers
Retailers and manufacturers hoping to compete in the $2.3 trillion global e-commerce market rely on a supply chain under increasing pressure from competitive innovation fueled by rising consumer expectations. To withstand that pressure, the concept of the traditional...
Stop Asking Your Team to Innovate Like Entrepreneurs… Until You Make Decisions Like VCs
Corporate innovation teams are taught in their organizations, and in the media and classes, to act like entrepreneurs navigating risk in a new venture or idea. But entrepreneurs usually work in partnership with their Venture Capitalists (VCs), because together they...
