Innovation Tournaments

Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.

If Amazon can't win in China, can anyone? When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited China in 2007, he expected that one day soon China would be a double-digit percentage of Amazon's sales. Yet, by 2019, Amazon, the most powerful and successful ecommerce company in the world, had quit China. In Winning in China: 8 Stories of Success and Failure in the World's Largest Economy, Wharton experts Lele Sang and Karl Ulrich explore the success and failure of several well-known companies, including Hyundai, LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital, and InMobi, as more and more businesses look to reap profits from the demand of 1.4 billion people. Sang, Global Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ulrich, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Wharton School, answer four critical questions: Which factors explain the success (or failure) of foreign companies entering China?What challenges and pitfalls can a company entering China expect to encounter? How can a prospective entrant realistically assess its chances? Which managerial decisions are critical, and which approaches are most effective? Sang and Ulrich answer these questions by examining the stories of eight well-known and respected companies that have entered China. They study: How Norwegian Cruise Line's entry into China displays how cultural differences can boost or sink different companies; How Intel, one of the oldest, most respected firms in Silicon Valley, thrived in a country that seems to favor agile upstarts; How Zegna, the Italian luxury brand, has emerged as another surprising success story and how it plans to navigate new headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic.Through these engaging and illuminating stories, Sang and Ulrich offer a framework and path for organizations looking for a way to successfully enter the world's largest economy. History can be a teacher, and China, a country with 3,500 years of written history, has much to teach.

What new products or services should you launch next year? How can you improve the productivity of a paint line? What should you name your new venture? How can you decrease patient waiting times? How can you improve the customer experience? Pretty much any creative problem-solving task can be framed as seeking a new match between solution and need, from operational process improvements to creating strategies to foster organic growth. Innovation tournaments aim to find a match that is not just good, but exceptional. Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes—whatever your challenges, whatever your business. In The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich offer an engaging, often humorous, and always actionable guide to help you learn: --How to frame and articulate your specific innovation challenge --How to decide on the right format, structure, and strategic direction for your own innovation tournament --How to maximize the quality of the opportunities that will compete --How to select the very best ideas --How to develop those ideas into real-world opportunities --How to use tournaments to foster a culture of innovation Fast-reading and filled with real-world successes, The Innovation Tournament Handbook is a comprehensive roadmap to finding a new match between a solution and a need that is not merely good, but exceptional.

A framework for achieving superior rates of organic growth Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm's ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth. What distinguishes these growth laggards from growth leaders like IBM, Nike, LEGO, American Express, Amazon, and Samsung that realize their full potential for growth? Wharton professor George S. Day shows that growth leaders use their innovation prowess to accelerate their growth at a faster rate. In this essential guide, Day reveals how to build this prowess by combining discipline in growth-seeking activities with an organizational ability to innovate. Day shows managers how to set a growth strategy that is realistic while still stretching the organization; search for the best growth opportunities along the full spectrum of 14 growth pathways; aim their growth-seeking activities toward the creation of new customer value; learn to profit from the uncertainty of innovation by successfully assessing and containing risk; build the organizational muscle to implement an ambitious growth strategy; and move faster from ideas to impact. With the strategies, processes, and methods discussed in Innovation Prowess, leaders can build a tested and comprehensive strategy for driving organic growth year after year. The Wharton Executive Essentials Series The Wharton Executive Essentials series from Wharton Digital Press brings the ideas of the Wharton School's thought leaders to you wherever you are. Inspired by Wharton's Executive Education program, each book is authored by globally renowned faculty and offers a quick-reading, penetrating, and comprehensive summary of the knowledge leaders need to excel in today's competitive business environment and capture tomorrow's opportunities.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage. This distinctive approach has three key elements: It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive. The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose. Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way. In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges. Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

Perceptive coverage of all 210 games from the legendary tournament, which featured Smyslov, Keres, Reshevsky, Petrosian, and 11 others, including the author. Suitable for players at all levels. Algebraic notation. 352 diagrams.

The best way for small stakes poker players to earn life-changing amounts of money is to win a satellite into a bigger tournament. Yet there is surprisingly little poker theory written about how to win satellite tournaments, until now. In Poker Satellite Strategy professional poker player Dara O’Kearney gives you a framework for how to approach every stage of a satellite tournament, from the early levels right up to the bubble. This book takes the stress and uncertainty out of satellites. You will learn: *Adjustments you need to make from regular poker tournament strategy *What hands to shove, call and fold on the bubble *When to tighten up and when to keep accumulating chips *Easy poker math to do at the tables *The correct poker GTO ranges (and how to adjust to to different player types and situations) *When it’s correct to fold Pocket Aces preflop Dara O’Kearney is a professional poker player from Ireland with a long standing reputation as the best satellite specialist in the game. He has won over $1 million in satellite tournaments alone and twice won the PokerStars UKIPT satellite leaderboard. He is sponsored by Unibet Poker and is the co-host of The Chip Race Podcast. “In the first 30 minutes of reading, I guarantee you will pick up something that will increase your future expectation to cover the cost of the book tenfold” – Marty “TheLipoFund” Mathis, partypoker PPL Satellite Leaderboard winner “A highly recommended book for anyone looking to play satellites well or related formats like Double or Nothing where multiple finishers receive identical top prizes” ~ Collin Moshman – author of Sit N’ Go Strategy “Dara has been ahead of the curve on satellites for years and his results show it. This book will change the way you think about, and play, satellites forever.”~Daiva Byrne - professional poker player and advocate for women in poker This book uses the most up-to-date poker ICM calculators, however it has been written in a way to make the poker math you need to do at the tables very simple. Every chapter starts from a poker GTOframework but then explains how you should deviate when the players or table dynamics change. It covers every aspect of satellite play, from the important bubble stage, but even explaining the poker game theory behind late registering, post flop play, poker mindset issues unique to satellites and how to adjust in live poker tournaments. It has everything a texas hold'em player needs to qualify for big poker tournaments like the World Poker Tour, EPT or World Series of Poker.