The Renaissance Innovator

Thoughts, examples and updates on the Renaissance Innovation Method

Posts by Serguei Netessine

Renaissance Innovation and startups

Posted on November 20, 2011

In this blog we discussed Renaissance Innovations of many companies, small and big, old and new.  Some of the startups we have already covered are Diapers.com, Objective Logistics, Amazon.com and many others. I hope that our blog makes it quite clear that the ideas of Renaissance Innovation method apply equally to startups and established companies.  However, in this post I wanted to focus just on startups.  The approach that is gaining a lot of momentum and good publicity is called “The Lean Startup“, most recently the new book debuted as #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. On the surface, this sounds like doing something on the cheap. These who know something about operations management will also recognize that “lean” is synonymous with…

Categories: Process, Theory

How to innovate the most boring industry ever

Posted on September 27, 2011

  OK, so here is a mind-bender for people with good imagination: how to innovate the most boring industry ever? Evidently, I am talking about sea transportation. As global trade keeps growing, ships keep transporting goods from China to Europe and to North America. The process is as simple as it gets: put stuff on the ship, sail for 20-40 days and get stuff off the ship.  There are, of course, hiccups.  There is bad weather, ship breakdowns, customs delays and, most recently, pirates. And there is certainly not much innovative one can offer here which does not break the rules of physics: faster ships? Teleportation? Lighter cargo? None of this is entirely realistic. And yet one company is doing it.  As other renaissance…

Categories: Examples, Videos

Back to school and more innovations

Posted on September 6, 2011

Evidently, we have been out for a while, preoccupied with long French summer… The good news is that most of our readers have been out as well, so no harm no foul. But it is good to be back to school and back to our blog.  In this first post of the new academic year I wanted to talk about a couple of recent innovations that I encountered in the popular press while on vacation, literally lying on the beach. While these stories are quite different, a common theme unites them: they are both about commodities. The reason they caught my eye is that I often teach for oil and gas companies (mostly Russian) and within INSEAD executive development programs we also often have…

Categories: Examples

The ultimate Internet retail innovator

Posted on June 11, 2011

Equating Amazon.com with innovation is a no-brainer.  The company has become the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of on-line retailing with nobody else even coming close. Amazon has built it business on books but over time it expanded into most other categories and it continues to dominate most of them.  Just like all other renaissance innovators, Amazon did not excel through creating new products (it sells what other do) or through new technologies (although Amazon leverages technology heavily, it is hard to argue that it invented Internet retailing). Rather, Amazon innovated the business model of selling goods through the Internet. Unlike what some believe, Amazon was not even the first company to sell books on the Internet but it was the one that figured out how…

Categories: Examples

How to beat Amazon.com at its own game

Posted on May 24, 2011

 Who is the 800 pound gorilla in the Internet retailing? There is no question about it – Amazon.com.  The story of this company is, by itself, an excellent example of the renaissance innovation: Amazon.com thrives thanks in large part to the highly efficient supply chain management which allows it to deliver millions of products to the customers quickly and at very reasonable prices. One day I will write a separate post about it but today I wanted to blog about another company that was in the news recently because it was “what Amazon fears most” according to the Business Week magazine.  Amazon’s nightmare is apparently a relatively small Internet startup out of New Jersey called Quidsi, which is better known by its main business…

Categories: Examples

Restaurant leaderboards

Posted on May 6, 2011

Restaurant industry is probably one of the last places to look for innovations: the industry has not really changed much in the last 200-300 years. The same poorly paid waiters service the same customers and work for the minimal wage plus tips.  One relatively major change that happened some years ago is the introduction of POS (point of sales) systems which provide a wealth of data on everything that is going on in the restaurant: meals served, checks paid, tips earned etc.  Some of the better restaurant chains started using this data to schedule waiters according to customer demand to help simplify life of managers who used to allocate waiters to days and tables manually.  But there is a new, innovative workforce management solution…

Categories: Examples

How to Build Risk into Your Business Model

Posted on April 23, 2011

Check out our new article  in the May 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review.  This is the first published preview of the theory behind  renaissance innovation.  The reader of the article will notice that, so far, our blog simply described in more detail,  the examples that appear in the article. As we have already hinted throughout this blog, the key behind successful Business Model Innovation is managing risks: in our view, all innovative companies we described in this blog have done the same thing right: they understood and managed the risk-return trade-offs in the design of their business model. This is, in our view, is a simple yet novel insight: all other works out there that study Business Models, typically focus on improving…

Categories: Theory

On-demand call centers in the house next to you

Posted on April 17, 2011

When disaster in Haiti happened, lots of people around the world wanted to help through donations. But who can organize a huge call center to accept donations on a one-day notice and dismiss it after a week or so? This task was taken on by LiveOps, a contact center company based in San Francisco.  Although you probably have never heard about the company, it might have serviced some of your calls to order a pizza, for instance. So what allowed LiveOps to handle this enormous task of establishing an overnight call center? The answer is: a novel approach to labor management which places LiveOps in the prominent company of renaissance innovators.

Categories: Examples

Blockbuster: the unlikely innovator

Posted on April 7, 2011

It really pains me to see “going out of business” sign on Blockbuster stores across the USA. Most of us know Blockbuster as a sore looser in the video-rental battle to newcomers such as Netflix, RedBox and Video on Demand. Few, however, know that in 1997 Blockbuster was responsible for one of the greatest renaissance innovations which revolutionized entire industry and propelled Blockbuster to be an undisputed industry leader.

Categories: Examples

How do you manufacture profitably in San Francisco?

Posted on April 3, 2011

The conventional wisdom seems to be that all manufacturing is moving to third-world countries, right?  Maybe if you follow conventional wisdom but renaissance innovators may think otherwise. Timbuk2.com, a San Francisco startup (well, it used to be in mid-90s, it is pretty big now) proves this rule wrong by having a highly successful manufacturing business right in down-town of the most expensive US city. How do they do this?

Categories: Examples, Theory