Corporate venturing is a difficult area at the best of times. However, creating spin-outs from a weak parent can be fatal – no matter how good the new venture. I suggest you sit comfortably and don’t read on if you are of a nervous disposition.   more »

This approach provides a simple way to compare the 'attractiveness' of different candidate projects.    more »

I was priveleged (along an intimate group of 1000 others) to hear Jack Welch talk about his career at GE. Despite criticisms of his job cutting programmes, he is someone I admire immensely for his intellect, focus on developing people and ability to cut through crap and business jargon to get to the heart of issues fast. Some of his simple principles from the night    more »

Assuming you have some form of decision making process for taking ideas through to products – you need to optimise ...   more »

Keywords: ventures, portfolio, management, innovation

You can't create a change in behaviours by changing a job title (sadly - it would be much easier if you could). The person will return to work on Monday morning, sit down and start doing the same things they were doing before you changed their title.   more »

A friend of mine, Neil McEvoy has an intersting new blog here - http://bootstrap-network.com/bootstrap-bloggers

Neil's a clever guy (he once turned down a job offer to work with me so he's very perceptive).  Sometimes his ideas on topics like social networking platforms are so clever they give me a nose bleed and a headache.  I expect this to be an interesting place to look for news and ideas.

Innovation is like a sales funnel, you get prospects in one end and hopefully ‘sales’ out of the other end. The costs associated with generating concepts, clustering, evaluating etc. can be very significant and the business should really understand how these costs are spent throughout the process.   more »

I love matrix organisations. I love seeing them done well and I take secret pleasure at seeing a group of intelligent people in an organisation occasionally tie themselves in knots with them.   more »

Part of the point of having portfolio management processes and, in particular, decision making criteria is to ensure that individual projects are not derailed   more »