Accelerating Your
Entrepreneurial Mindset:
Portfolio Management
for Business Growth

How do you integrate innovation with portfolio management for accelerated business growth? Based on an extensive three-year study, McGrath (with her co-author Ian MacMillan) identified five areas in which exceptional growth opportunities can be found: the customer experience, reconfigured offerings and services, key metrics, industry dynamics, and emerging market shifts.

Even seasoned executives struggle with the right practices to drive growth most effectively. Rita will examine five practices associated with creating a spirit of entrepreneurship within an established organization and will offer practical approaches to becoming more proficient in each.

• The Essence of Dynamic Strategies - We all know it: the rules for success today will be different than they were yesterday, and tomorrow can be different yet again. Learn how dynamic strategies differ from the conventional quest for ‘sustainable competitive advantage’ and what this implies for you as a leader within your organization.

• Investing in the Business of Tomorrow: Real Options Perspective - New initiatives, ventures and products fail more often than they succeed. How, therefore, do you justify investing in them? In this segment, you will be introduced to the concept of treating new initiatives as ‘real options’ that give you the right, but not the obligation, to make a further investment in the future. Similar to a financial option, a real option suggests limited downside investments to gain access to a large potential future upside, without having to commit yourself to it at the outset.

• Constructing an Opportunity Portfolio: Matching Strategy and Investment - Successfully managing a company today requires a leader to be a little schizophrenic – in the core business, it’s all about operational excellence, satisfaction of today’s customers, and enhancing what you do incrementally. In the future businesses, it’s all about learning, trial and error and experimentation. In this segment, we will explore a framework for understanding when each type of behavior makes sense. We will also look at a process to align your strategy, budgets, projects and people systems.

• Discovery Driven Planning - Conventional planning is perfect for businesses that you know and understand. But when you start having to make assumptions about the future, conventional planning can be deadly. Discovery driven planning is a proven technique now used by companies all over the world to foster learning and impose appropriate discipline on new initiatives.

• MarketBusting - MarketBusting moves are those that create upheaval in markets, often with surprisingly prosaic products. This segment will provide an overview of three year’s worth of research that has resulted in five paths to MarketBusting, and get into detail on the lens that relates most closely to bringing market intelligence into your systems.

Rita Gunther McGrath is well known for her work on innovation, entrepreneurship and corporate growth strategies. She has co-authored two books published by the Harvard Business School Press, The Entrepreneurial Mindset (2000) and most recently, MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth (2005). Among the companies she has worked with recently are 3M, Nokia, Swiss Re, Microsoft, The Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the Kone Corporation of Finland, Air Products and DuPont. Rita joined the faculty of Columbia Business School in 1993. Prior to life in academia, she was an IT director, worked in the political arena and founded two startups. Her Ph.D. is from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Rita’s academic publications have appeared in leading journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal and Management Science. She has won numerous awards for excellence in scholarship. Among these are the Strategic Management Society 'best paper' and ‘runner up’ awards in 2001 and 2004; the Maurice Holland award from the Industrial Research Institute; the Academy of Management Review "best paper" award, the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Award for the Best Conceptual Paper (both 1992 and 1996) and the European Foundation for Entrepreneurship Research (EFER) best paper award. She is on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, the Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Business Venturing.

At Columbia, she teaches MBA and Executive MBA courses in strategy and the innovation process. She teaches regularly in Columbia’s top-rated executive education programs, and is the Faculty Director for Leading Strategic Growth and Change, Executing Breakthrough Strategy and Creating Breakthrough Strategy.

Finding the Future First...
	Larry Keeley Innovation Strategist President and Co-Founder Doblin, Inc.
According to Business Week (8/05), innovation guru Larry Keeley has "done pioneering work in deconstructing different kinds of innovation, building diagnostic measures of innovation, and analyzing the root causes of innovation failure. He tells companies that the really big hits are often the products that innovate in not one but two or three or more "innovation spaces." In this exclusive keynote presentation, Keeley will tell you why a traditional gated portfolio management process may actually impede portfolio optimization and innovation effectiveness. Instead he will offer methods for diagnosing innovation, identifying unmet market needs, and building tools that properly guide and support your own program teams plus a case that brings the tools together. Specifically he will cover: How new discoveries about innovation effectiveness can help you "find the future first" - before your competitors. Why six sigma, streamlined supply chains, acquisitions, and other profit-boosting activities may still not yield real growth; how to innovate for organic growth. How to pinpoint the revenue and profit targets needed to fill gaps two, three, or four years out - and then close these gaps reliably.   How to go beyond commonplace approaches that cause innovation to fail so frequently. Doblin Inc. has worked for more than twenty-five years to perfect innovation methods that work. Collectively, these new methods help build a robust innovation competence to leap beyond competitors. For the Management Roundtable, Larry Keeley will offer a fresh, powerful approach that moves innovation from a vague hope to a deep competence. Larry Keeley is President of Chicago-based Doblin Inc., a leading consulting firm that focuses on effective innovation. He lectures frequently and teaches at IIT’s Institute of Design, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and the London Business School. His new book "Taming of the New," is due out next year. Larry Keeley is a strategist who has worked to develop more effective innovation methods for over twenty-five years.  Larry is president and co-founder of Doblin Inc, an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems that materially improve innovation success rates. Since 1979, Keeley has worked with many global companies on innovation effectiveness, among them Aetna, American Express, Amoco, Apple, Citigroup, Consignia, Diageo, GE, Hallmark, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, Shell, Steelcase, Target, Texas Instruments, WellPoint, Whirlpool, and Zurich Financial Services.  He lectures frequently and publishes regularly on strategic aspects of innovation.  He has written book on innovation effectiveness “The Taming of the New,” in press, and expected next year from Harvard Business School Press.  BusinessWeek recently named Keeley one of seven Innovation Gurus that are changing the field, and specifically cited Doblin for having many of the most sophisticated tools for delivering innovation effectiveness.  See their issue of August 1st, 2005 for the full report or their special Innovation channel on the web at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/. Keeley teaches graduate innovation strategy classes at the Institute of Design in Chicago, the first design school in the U.S. with a Ph.D. program, where he is also a board member.  He lectures at executive education programs at Kellogg Graduate School of Management and in their Masters of Manufacturing Management program, and with the London Business School.  Keeley was a Senior Fellow of the Center for Business Innovation, in Boston. He is also a board member for WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s public radio station, where he has charted strategy for what has become the most innovative station in the public radio network in the US.