Articles by GroundControl

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 Framework
Using the Startup Studio model to structure Corporate Innovation Labs

The topic of how to structure the perfect corporate innovation lab comes up regularly when talking to innovation managers.


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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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Portfolio Management
Portfolio management is a long-tail game

When looking at the success of startups, a common belief is that one third of the companies fail, one third return their money and one third of the companies become successful enough to really move the needle on your investment portfolio. But is that true?


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Portfolio Management
How we look at Innovation portfolio management

The other week at the Lean Startup Summit I introduced our ROI calculator in a couple of innovation accounting roundtable sessions. The sessions were overbooked in general since innovation accounting and the connection to portfolio management was a topic many were interested in. Most of the people joining the tables were looking for ways to […]


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Innovation Investments
The corporate ‘Innovation Mascot’

-”Ok, we agree, let’s try innovation. We’ll start slow, with 2 or 4 startups and see what happens”. I have heard this often enough. It seems a logical thing to do, try something first. The problem lies in the fact that people often forget that investing in ideas is, and always will be, a betting game. So the chances of these two or four startups becoming a success are slim considering the odds of 2 out of 10 will make it big.


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Innovation Ecosystem
How we co-create corporate startups

Creating and running startups as part of a corporate is hard. It’s because the whole organization of a corporate is heavily optimized on execution. And that is how it is supposed to be! Startups however are searching. Searching for a business model that works and can only start executing when they’ve found that working model. […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
The 24-month journey to product/market fit

How long does it usually take to go through all four phases and what type of investment fits every stage?


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Innovation Investments
Investment should not be the single goal of a founder

“-Can you tell me what you would look for in a startup so I can properly build my MVP?” I am at a Meetup where investors (VC’s mostly) sit around the table with Saas startups. Others are nodding at this question, it is the thing they want to know as well. “-So what do you […]


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Lean Startup
How to turn your risky assumptions into Experiments

Once you have filled in your NEXT Canvas, you are stuck with a pile of stickies filled with assumptions. Do they all need to be tested? Is every single one of them risky? Where do I start validating my business model?! 1. Determine the impact and evidence of each assumption There are a couple of […]


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Lean Startup
Why we stopped building MVP’s

At NEXT we decided to drop the word MVP and use solution experiment, prototype, or first version instead.


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