HP
5 Questions That Spot Breakthroughs Before They Happen
In October 1903, The New York Times published an editorial mocking the idea of human flight, stating that a successful flying machine might take "from one to ten million years" to develop through the efforts of mathematicians and engineers. Eight weeks later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright
I Evaluated Over 30,000 Innovation Ideas at HP: Here's Why Most Failed
Your best innovation ideas aren't losing to bad ideas – they're losing to exhaustion. I know that sounds counterintuitive. After 30 years of making billion-dollar innovation decisions at HP and CableLabs, I thought I understood why good ideas failed. Market timing. Technical challenges. Resource constraints. Sometimes
Why 'Fail Fast' Innovation Advice Is Wrong
The most popular piece of innovation advice in Silicon Valley is wrong—and it's killing great ideas before they have a chance to succeed. I can prove it with a story about a glass of water that sat perfectly still while a car bounced beneath it. My name
Innovation Partnership Autopsy: HP, Fossil, and the Smartwatch Market
Innovation partnerships can create breakthrough markets—or hand them to competitors through terrible decisions. I know because I lived through both outcomes. Bill Geiser from Fossil and I had it exactly right. We built the MetaWatch—a smartwatch with week-long battery life, Bluetooth connectivity, and every feature that would
How HP and Fossil Handed Apple the Smartwatch Market
The inside story of vision without execution: why being right about the future means nothing without the courage to act on breakthrough insights
I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days.
Why smart executives consistently destroy breakthrough technology. The HP Palm WebOS autopsy reveals predictable thinking patterns behind billion-dollar failures.
My Meeting With Elon Musk: Innovate Like A 5-Year-Old
When I walked into Elon Musk's office at Tesla in 2011, I knew I was about to see something remarkable, but I couldn't have predicted how mind-opening the experience would be. Elon Musk, known for revolutionizing industries through SpaceX and Tesla, has a way of
Being Thrown Under The Bus: The Dilemma of Blame
This last week, I got pulled back into a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise ($HPE) news cycle. Last Thursday, the UK courts ruled there was fraud by Autonomy, their CEO and CFO related to its acquisition by HPE. When HPE wrote down $8.8 billion against the acquisition in 2012, HPE executive leadership got b
3 Tips to Innovating with a Co-Innovation Partner
Co-innovation is a common term used in the innovation space. It describes two organizations of any kind that come together to innovate in an area of common interest. I am not only talking about collaboration. Co-innovation seeks to deliver a result such as a product or service. There
Do Faster Release Cycles Hurt Innovation?
Have you noticed that there is a constant cycle of new product releases? Organizational quarterly results often drive these releases. Cars, smartphone devices, home automation products, applications all follow this pattern of release cycles. I believe the fear of being left behind is what draws people to upgrades. They don&