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Business Strategy for Software Executives |
February 6 , 2006 |
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Top 10 Innovation MythsSoftware vendors seeking success need to push past the excuses, find differentiation and swallow this dose of business reality.By Geoffrey A. Moore, TCG Advisors If you are worrying about innovation, take heart. Only successful companies do. By contrast, unsuccessful companies either aren't around to do any worrying or are consumed with more pressing concerns, like meeting payroll or paying their bills. At the other end of the spectrum, venture-backed start-ups have lots of worries, but innovating isn't one of them--they actually worry more about not innovating, as in let's not waste our scarce resources reinventing wheels that others have already developed. But you are not a start-up. You have some success, some momentum, and therefore some inertia, and it is the inertia that has you worried. By design inertia resists change. This is a good thing, as long as you are headed in a direction you want to go. But when the market changes, inertia acts against your future interests. Now you are right to be worried. So you raise the topic of innovation in hopes of getting some insight. Good luck. My recent research leads me to believe that innovation, as a topic, leads the business writing industry in twaddle per page. With that in mind, let me dispel what, in David Letterman tradition, we might call the Top Ten Myths about Business Innovation:
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Bootstrap Your Business For GrowthMany software companies have achieved success before seeking the help of venture capitalists. James Quist built MedeFinance into a $5 million company before seeking outside investment. Quist offers three guidelines to bootstrapping a software startup in this week's post to the SandHill.com Blog on Software Finance. Web 2.0: A Sea Change?Is Web 2.0 anything more than a clever name for a conference? Tony Baer of onStrategies says Web 2.0 advances won't change everything but they will aggregate services that are more valuable than the sum of their parts. Read the analysis in this week's SandHill.com Blog post on New Era, New Thinking. The SandHill.com Blog is ready for your perspectives. We publish insightful strategy and opinion pieces by a variety of software executives, analysts and professionals. If you would like to contribute a post, email editor@sandhill.com. OpSource SaaS Summit in MarchDiscover a community of peers at the OpSource SaaS Summit - the only event where you will be able to join SaaS users, developers and technology partners to exchange ideas and cultivate opportunities in the growing SaaS ecosystem. The event will take place March 1-3, 2006 at the Silverado Resort in Napa, Calif. Register by February 15, 2006 and save $100. Register now! Be sure the software executive community knows about your upcoming event. This week, the Brenner Group presents The CXO Forum and the IDBNetwork presents "Video Blogs Killed the TV Star," both in Moutain View, Calif. Post your event on SandHill.com by visiting the community page and clicking on "Want to post an event?" Don't Miss McKinsey's 10 Trends
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THIS WEEK'S SPONSOR
Softrax solutions fundamentally change the way technology companies manage, analyze, report, and forecast their revenue. Find out more at www.softrax.com. SOFTWARE PULSESoftware Pulse is a publication of SandHill.com, the online resource for software business strategy. To subscribe, To unsubscribe, see the bottom of this email. Forward this email to a friend Send us your feedback, SandHill.com is published by Sand Hill Group, which provides investment and management advice to emerging leaders in the $600 billion enterprise software, services and solutions market. Sand Hill Group produces the Software and the Enterprise series of conferences for industry executives, and authors research reports on cutting-edge technology topics. |
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