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An act of deception has won many a military battle – from Sun Tzu to the Trojan Horse, from Alexander the Great, Hannibal or Napolean to the Spaniards defeating the overwhelmingly more numerous Incas. Here are some examples that I have seen deployed to mislead a competitor – what would you add? Creating a ‘smokescreen’ of patent filings covering technology of lesser commercial interest to make it difficult to ascertain the actual… Read More
Everyone has plans. Those who excel at implementing ‘the plan’ are usually operating on old information. If you have up to date information and high quality analysis you can make your çompetitor’s plans irrelevant. Competitor actions, on the other hand, are not so easy to avoid. If you have the right process in place, then you have a fair chance of predicting their likely options and which they will choose.
Einstein said: “life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Similarly, with businesses and business strategy. A business that does not move forward will lose its balance between profiting from existing business enterprises and building (or acquiring) new enterprises for future growth. Consider Kodak, a US colossus recently in the news, that focused so heavily on its existing film business that it failed to effectively harness… Read More
For many years people have sought insight about innovation prowess and patent values from patent data. This has led to the creation of a number of proprietary algorithms that use patent statistic to deliver this insight. The sellers of these algorithms often require end-users to take on faith that the algorithms used are correct and have been scientifically examined for their correlation with the reported findings. Thomson Scientific’s recent publication of the… Read More
If you encountered an alien from another world and wanted him to understand the concept of what a word is, chances are you would put words (and their object or idea representation) into context with the letters from which we write them and the sentences and paragraphs for which they are a part. This is the best way to describe any system – to put it into context with a system below… Read More
One of the first rules of creating a winning strategy is to see things as they are and not as we believe them to be. Strategy is not forgiving of misinterpretations about the way things are. For example, if everyone believes that Microsoft is inhibiting innovation in an area when in fact the company is fostering innovation, that misinterpretation will not change the reality. To illustrate, open source thrives in the presence… Read More
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