Brian Leavy

A leader's guide to creating an innovation culture

Purpose – Advising top management how to find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency in order to turn innovation into commercial reality.Design/methodology/approach – The author interviewed senior corporate managers and reviewed the literature.Findings – Inventiveness is required in everything that is done by the company, not just in marketing or in new product development. A key factor in boosting innovativeness is establishing the right organizational climate to nurture the creative potential of employees and make use of their knowledge of customers, competitors, and processes. When leveraging the best innovation practices of other companies look to their philosophy and values.Research limitations/implications – More interviews and a study to determine long‐term success factors would be advisable.Practical implications – Key practices: place people and ideas at the heart of management philosophy; give people room to grow, to try and learn from mistakes; build a strong sense of ope...

Outsourcing strategies: opportunities and risks

Managers in developed countries are increasingly interested in outsourcing as a potential source of competitiveness and value creation. There has been a growing awareness of the potential of outsourcing to support a range of strategies beyond that of lower cost. This article makes corporate strategists familiar with four of the most promising opportunities for using outsourcing strategies – focus, scale without mass, disruptive innovation and strategic repositioning. While assessing the potential of these opportunities in specific corporate situations, strategists also need to look at two of the most significant associated risks – the risk of losing skills that could be key to competing in the future, and the risk of turning to outsourcing at the wrong stage in an industry’s evolution. The article widens managers’ views of the strategic alternatives that outsourcing can be used to support, while making managers aware of the main risks to be weighed in the balance. Case examples of companies that have successfully attempted the four types of outsourcing are examined.

Design thinking – a new mental model of value innovation

Purpose – As value innovation becomes a core top management concern, there is a growing recognition that “design thinking,” or the creative principles long associated with the design function, may now have something very significant to offer when applied more broadly to business management and strategy development. This paper aims to investigate this issue.Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyzes the techniques of Roger Martin, one of design thinkings most widely recognized advocates. Martin introduces a set of concepts that are not familiar to most managers: the knowledge funnel, the distinction between reliability and validity, and abductive reasoning.Findings – Using case examples of leading companies such as Proctor & Gamble, the paper shows how they have developed a capacity for design thinking.Research limitations/implications – The paper presents case reports.Practical implications – The paper provides a detailed description of how Proctor & Gamble and its CEO A.G.Lafley introduced and imp...

Collaborative innovation as the new imperative – design thinking, value co‐creation and the power of “pull”

Purpose – This “Masterclass” for corporate leaders aims to explain how to integrate three revolutionary approaches to business innovation to stimulate and propel the creativity that remains latent in and around most organizations.Design/methodology/approach – Veteran “Masterclass” author Brian Leavy believes that collaborative innovation is the new corporate imperative and explains how three sets of revolutionary thinking and practices – design thinking, value co‐creation and the power of “pull” – can create new opportunities for businesses.Findings – The paper reveals three key lessons: within the world of business, the design perspective is now being applied to a much wider range of challenges beyond the traditional concerns of product aesthetics and ease‐of‐use, including the search for innovative strategies, business models and organizational structures and processes; the core principle of co‐creation is ‘engaging people to create valuable experiences together while enhancing network economics; and or...

On studying leadership in the strategy field

Abstract This article is primarily concerned with the study of leadership in the strategy field. It argues that as our perspective on the strategy process itself changes so too must our perspective on top leadership and our approaches to studying it. From a review of the literature the article identifies some of the current issues and challenges in studying leadership and strategy and argues for more dynamic and contextually-sensitive approaches than those that have dominated up to now. It presents and develops a framework for the future study of leadership based on three main foundations: Mintzbergs (1978) concept of strategy formation, Pettigrews (1985) contextualism, and the authors empirical studies to date. The framework focuses on the process of leadership and its role within the more inclusive process of strategy formation. This process-within-a-process perspective, it is argued, potentially opens the way to gaining fresh perspective on leadership by inviting attention to such underexplored issues as how and why leadership effectiveness varies with time and context, how the symbolic and substantive aspects of leadership interact to produce outcomes of strategic significance, and how successive leaders and their tenures are connected in the strategy formation process over time. At a time when the field of sociology is showing an increasing interest in the concept of strategy, there appears to be great scope for a more serious infusion of the sociological perspective in the opposite direction, and frameworks, such as the one presented in this paper, may help to get such a movement underway.

Exploring the Relationship between Software Process Adaptive Capability and Organisational Performance

Software development is a complex socio-technical activity, with the result that software development organisations need to establish and maintain robust software development processes. While much debate exists regarding the effectiveness of various software development approaches, no single approach is perfectly suited to all settings and no setting is unchanging. The capability to adapt the software process is therefore essential to sustaining an optimal software process. We designed an exploratory study to concurrently examine software process adaptive capability and organisational performance in 15 software development organisations, finding that companies with greater software process adaptive capability are shown to also experience greater business success. While our exploratory study of the complex relationship between these phenomena is limited in some respects, the findings indicate that software process adaptive capability may be worthy of further integration into software process engineering techniques. Software process adaptive capability may be an important organisational strength when deriving competitive advantage, and those responsible for the creation and evolution of software process models and methodologies may want to focus some of their future efforts in this area.

A system for innovating business models for breakaway growth

Purpose – Companies recently have begun to look for ways to help make value pioneering more systematic and repeatable. This “Masterclass” paper aims to examine one of the first frameworks for making value innovation an effective, manageable practice, an approach practiced by Mark W. Johnson.Design/methodology/approach – This “Masterclass” paper shows how Johnsons framework for mapping the “basic architecture underlying all successful businesses” can be understood in terms of four main elements of the business model.Findings – A degree of creativity and a willingness to experiment, pilot and adjust as you go, remains part of the business model innovation process, the author found, but Johnsons four‐element framework can serve to “bring the discipline of architecture” to the process, and provide a structure on which “a manageable” and more repeatable innovation activity can be pursued.Practical implications – The paper explains how to go about developing an innovative business model. The process starts wi...

Assessing your strategic alternatives from both a market position and core competence perspective

The practice of strategic decision‐making has two major perspectives to help managers create and maintain competitive advantage in the face of a range of business challenges. One stresses market position and the other core competence. (1) Market position – the positioning approach to strategy development is associated mainly with the work of Michael Porter; strategic choice is focused primarily on the structure of the industry and how it might be shaped to advantage. The aim is to establish a “privileged”/hard‐to‐replicate position in an industry that is difficult to enter. (2) Core competence – the competence‐led perspective is associated with the work of C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel; strategic choice focuses primarily on assessing which distinctive competences should be built, then considers the market opportunities that would exploit them best. It may be tempting to use one approach or the other because the market position and core competence approaches do create perspectives that see things very differently, and their analytical methodologies offer different guidance. But instead of picking one over the other, the astute strategist may be best served to test out both perspectives and generate a wider range of options. This is shown in the article’s illustrations of corporate strategy in the multi‐business firm and strategic renewal. In sum, looking at your business from both approaches will generate two sets of contrasting perspectives and options for action. For many firms, this binocular vision of the available strategic options will lead to a better result than if either perspective was used alone.

A complexity theory viewpoint on the software development process and situational context

The research literature informs us that a software development process should be appropriate to its software development context but there is an absence of explicit guidance on how to achieve the harmonization of a development process with the corresponding situational context. Whilst this notion of harmonization may be intuitively appealing, in this paper we argue that interaction between a software development process and its situational context is an instance of a complex system. In Complexity Theory, complex systems consist of multiple agents that interact in a multitude of diverse ways, with system outcomes being non-deterministic. Complex systems are therefore noted to be difficult to control, such as is the case with many software development endeavors. If the interaction of software processes with situational contexts is representative of a complex system, then we should not be surprised that the task of software development has proven so resistant to attempts to produce generalized software processes. We should also seek to ameliorate the software development challenge through the adoption of techniques recommended for use in managing complex systems, not as a replacement for the many software process approaches presently in use, but as complement that can aid the task of process definition and evolution.

Value pioneering – how to discover your own “blue ocean”: interview with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

Purpose – To study blue ocean strategy (value innovation management), which not only reframes the strategic challenge – from competing to making the competition irrelevant – but also provides a series of tools and frameworks to act on this insight in a way that maximizes the opportunity and minimizes the risk.Design/methodology/approach – This interview with Professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne considers the concept of value innovation management and examines the ideas and tools they developed in their book Blue Ocean Strategy (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), the product of a successful twenty‐year research and consultancy partnership.Findings – Blue ocean strategy is applicable across all types of industries from typical consumer product goods to b2b. It offers an alternative approach to the existing strategic planning process, one that is based not on preparing a spreadsheet document but on drawing a strategy canvas.Research limitations/implications – The interview gives professors Kim and M...