The Venture Edge

I’m in the middle of preparing some materials for a three-day corporate seminar I’m giving in June on innovation and technology commercialization and I’m trying to decide on the key concepts I want to focus on. One of those concepts is definitely the idea that we should worry less about the competition and focus more on how we position ourselves uniquely, so that in the customer’s mind we stand out from the crowd. 

The popular reality show Survivor got people talking about tribes and voting people off the island (much like Jim Collin's Good to Great mantra of getting the wrong people off the bus).  But the idea of modern-day people organizing themselves into tribes actually stemmed from the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.