Before I tout another HBS product, let me make this clear up front – Harvard Business School is NOT affiliated with or supporting IdeaFlow in any way! (I can dream, though….!) I recently received the premiere issue of the new Strategy & Innovation newsletter, and loved it. Its main focus seems to be how to foster and manage disruptive innovation (as opposed to sustaining innovation), and that’s no surprise, considering that the new newsletter is co-sponsored and largely produced by Innosight, a consultancy founded by HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, Mr. Disruptive Innovation himself.

Christensen’s introductory article spells out the newsletter’s focus: Taking the risk and uncertainty out of innovation management. Theories of innovation are only helpful insofar as they lead to success under varying circumstances. Simply explaining that Solution X lead to a successful innovation outcome at Company Y may not necessarily mean that Solution X will help Company Z – unless Solution X has been tested and researched thoroughly enough that all the circumstances under which Solution X will work are known.

The best article to my mind, though, was a guest column by Anthony Ulwick that essentially championed a bottom-up approach to innovation. Much of a company’s truly creative ideation and brainstorming around new product concepts is just so much wasted time and effort if it is being done around ideas that do not deliver what the customers themselves value: “Employees think about product, distribution, pricing, service, and advertising issues, and generate hundreds of ideas across all disciplines, bogging down an already complex process to the point where inaction is commonplace. The alternative is to know first where the opportunities for improvement lie.” And these opportunities lie in the outcomes in which the customers themselves find value – not outcomes where the company perceives there to be value for the customers. Kinda World-of-Ends-ish, isn't it?!!