3.1 (Week 3)

1). There’s a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different. Operational effectiveness is about things that you really shouldn’t have to make choices on; it’s about what’s good for everybody and about what every business should be doing.

Strategies and innovation can co-exist. One must have to maintain the continuity of strategy. But they must also have to be good at continuously improving. But they also have to be good at continuously improving. South west airlines, for example has focused on a strategy of serving price-minded customers who want to go from place to place on relatively short, frequently offered flights without much service. The purpose of innovation is to create business value. Value can be defined in many ways, such as incremental improvements to existing products, the creation of entirely new products and services, or reducing cost.

2.). Most senior leaders in established organizations have never formally learned how to lead and manage an organization that innovates systematically. When you have been successful playing one game by one set of rules it is understandably difficult to play a new game with a different set of rules, especially if no one explained the new rules.

There are two key factors that create the innovation gap.

a).The first is knowledge. Many established organizations are not innovative because their leaders do not know how to make innovation systematic.

b). The second is that some of the management systems that made organizations successful in the industrial economy are now major obstacles as they try to become more innovative in the knowledge economy.

3). According to Hammer, there are three ways to start innovation process:

a).Start a new conversation: Companies that