Why Innovators Should Study the Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire

Entrepreneurs and innovators resist “success as usual” syndrome, exploring emerging technologies and new business models. They try to keep the big picture in mind and are wary of being too efficient and too optimized. This perspective helps them promote unconventional ways of thinking, solving problems, and challenging the status quo. They know the goal is not to chase a fixed horizon but to understand when and how the horizon moves as they approach it.

Source: Why Innovators Should Study the Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire

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Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model

Pricing based on customer outcomes has the potential to turn the buyer/seller relationship into more of a partnership, because both sides are working toward common objectives. The seller is motivated to drive efficiency and positive outcomes – because the more successful the customer is, the more revenue it generates.

Source: Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model | pwc

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Are You The Point Of Inflection?

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.” …

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Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

With cognitive computing, we are now able to unlock the value in ALL the data — from internal, external and even publicly available sources — available to a business. Much of this data was previously inaccessible as it existed in was unstructured (documents, emails, social media posts and images etc.), or was dispersed among any many systems and silos. Hear how two companies are already using cognitive computing to disrupt their industries:

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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

It’s difficult to navigate through all the myriad factors to identify what might really be behind this picture, but perhaps the real story is less about the impending death of large businesses and more about their need to adapt – to move through business and product life cycles more quickly than before, to be more focused on systematic experimentation and organising swiftly around opportunity.

Source: Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

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Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

In the 1960s, General Motors held a ~50% share of the US automobile market and 80% of the industry’s profits. General Motors’ integrated value chain allowed it to dominate the industry in an era where products were still not “good enough” (with respect to performance and reliability). But as automobile performance improved, modular, “low-end” disruptors like Toyota attacked it from below and profits evaporated. Toyota did not succeed by immediately attacking the premium segment of the market. It started with the low-end Corona and “then moved up-market by introducing sequentially its Tercel, Corolla, Camry, Avalon and 4-Runner models, and ultimately its Lexus”. Honda and Nissan followed similar approaches to disrupt integrated incumbents like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Now, these disruptors are in turn facing low-end disruption from the likes of Kia and Hyundai.

Source: Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

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The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world–and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Source: The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande

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