Esther Gons

Esther Gons is the award-winning author of The Corporate Startup & Innovation Accounting. Winner of the 2022 Golden Axiom Business Book Award, 2019 Golden Axiom Business Book Award, and the 2018 Management Book Of The Year Award. She is an expert in Innovation Accounting, Innovation Strategy and Portfolio Management.
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Articles by Esther Gons

Innovation Ecosystem
When ‘mindset’​ is the biggest hurdle for innovation in your company

For most executives, it’s people and culture that drive innovation. They feel that a different, more creative mindset from employees will help improve innovation company-wide. Innovation managers, on the other hand, blame the lack of an ‘innovation’ mindset from leadership for not being able to advance in innovation.  Mindset has become the scapegoat for not […]


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Innovation Accounting
An executive summary of the ‘Innovation Accounting’ book

The definition of Innovation Accounting Innovation Accounting is “an organized system of principles and indicators designed to gather, classify, analyze and report data about a company’s breakthrough and disruptive innovation efforts – working to complement the existing financial accounting system.” From “Innovation Accounting, a practical guide for measuring your innovation ecosystem’s performance” Why do we […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
If you want to think out of the box, make a new box

By now, we all understand that explore and exploit are entirely different things, and any organization is aware of the need for innovation. When you test and try something new, you are in explore, and when you optimize and grow a business model, you are in exploit. The common practice seems to be to throw everything that appears new in one […]


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Innovation Framework
How to create an innovation framework for your company

An innovation framework provides guiding principles for developing a series of questions that can assess where a product is along its journey.


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Innovation Ecosystem
The 5 conditions for professionalizing innovation

If you want to allow innovation to blossom in your company, you need a separate corprate governance system to support it. This will allow you to search for new business models in a company that is designed to be a high-performing way of executing what you already do, and which is structurally adverse to anything […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
The innovation management matrix explained

Setting up a dedicated management system for startup innovation is something that can be only done if there is a clear way of deciding what is what. Ultimately this is one of the necessary steps in professionalising innovation within your company.


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Innovation Ecosystem
Kickstart corporate innovation by building a Minimum Viable Ecosystem

In our book The Corporate Startup, we describe what an innovation ecosystem is and how you can build an innovation ecosystem within your company. An ecosystem is needed to foster innovation company-wide, with the right governance in the right places, and multiple ways to do innovation. Where everyone knows how to do innovation, how to […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
Innovate or die! What does innovation mean in your company?

Apart from the well known adagium it is the most common answer I get when talking to companies about their most urgent reasons to innovate.


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Innovation Framework
Introducing the NEXT Canvas

The NEXT Canvas visualizes the four types of proof an idea needs to become a profitable business model


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Innovation Ecosystem
Governance is the key to company-wide innovation

A lot of organizations we work with today recognize the innovation rhythm and the difference between searching and executing. The rhythm of innovation is different and less linear than that of other corporate processes. Innovation is the search for a business model of which we do not know if it will work, whereas corporates are […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
An executive summary of The Corporate Startup

The best way to innovate is for a large company to view itself as an innovation ecosystem. Because of its core business, an established company cannot be as flexible as a startup, which can focus itself on creating one single product. Instead, established companies need to increase their innovation capabilities from within, without endangering their […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
Innovation never occurs in a void

It is rather more likely a synthesis across domains or even combining opposites. There are several types of innovation. You need them all.Apart from innovating your products and the processes of your current business models, you also need to innovate whole business models. Define the types of innovation for your organisation.Exploring new models requires a […]


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