Week 11 Reading Reflection

Gary Pisano: You Need an Innovation Strategy

Harvard Business Review

1. In this week's reading, I would not say that I was surprised by the article, but enjoyed Pisano's coverage of the reminding facts that I had forgotten, so "surprised by reminders"? It's true that innovation is hard, which is a well-known fact, but I simply had not thought of it in the way that the author described when he said sustaining innovative performance can be more complex and difficult - such as in the case of Nokia, Polaroid, and etc.
2. There was a part of the reading that I was definitely confused about when the author said: "Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a grab bag of much-touted best practices: dividing R&D into decentralized autonomous teams, spawning internal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up corporate venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, embracing open innovation and crowdsourcing, collaborating with customers, and implementing rapid prototyping, to name just a few." - What does all this mean?
3. I would want to ask the author:
• The question above, say it more simply. This is for the purpose to understand.
• The second question that I would ask the author is what is another great example of innovation strategy, which may be invaluable in the short-life cycle present at Silicon Valley?
4. I did not think the author was wrong about anything in this article.