Category: Strategy
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When productivity goes up, innovation quietly flattens
Liu, C., Denrell J., Luukkonen J., Chater, N. (2026). Using AI Can Stifle Innovation, But It Doesn’t Have To. Harvard Business Review, 104(4), 40–43. These excerpts explore a growing tension in how organizations use AI: the same tools that increase individual productivity may quietly reduce collective learning and innovation. The authors argue that when “good…
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Why Deep Research Still Matters
In 2025, our team spent a significant amount of time doing deep research in healthcare, from medical devices to mental health. Much of that work involved sitting with complexity: listening carefully, testing assumptions, and trying to understand not just what people do, but how they make sense of deeply personal situations. In an environment obsessed…
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Manage inputs, not outputs
I keep returning to Working backwards. Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. A great insiders view of Amazon’s period of growth and mindset of customer obsession. I want to focus here on what Amazon calls input and output metrics. Amazon focuses on controllable input metrics, the drivers, when managed well can lead to profitable…
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Category design (Part two)
Picked up Play Bigger again. The concept of category design makes a lot of sense and cross-links to many concepts out there already. In a nutshell: define and create a new category, and then dominate the category by positioning yourself as the category king. It is hard to unseat category kings due to the many…
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Business Model Innovation
I have been following how ‘business design’ is becoming part of the toolkit of digital and service designers. At the heart of any sustainable business is a profitable business model. Business model innovation goes hand in hand with product innovation. Understanding business model archetypes, the profitability of each, and how components can be recombined to…