The Foundations of Innovation

In 1991, James March published what would become one of the most cited papers in organizational science.In it, he described a fundamental tension at the heart of every learning system: the choice bet...

In the late 1990s, Clayton Christensen was asked to help a school district solve a discipline problem.Students were disrupting class. Talking out of turn. Acting out. The district had tried the obvio...

Week 5: What Drucker Actually Said About the Business You're Building In 1994, Peter Drucker published an essay in Harvard Business Review that should be required reading for every founder before the...

Week 4: The Lean Startup's Missing Layer In 2011, Eric Ries published a book that genuinely changed how a generation of founders thinks about building companies. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepr...

Week 3: Kahneman Knew Founders Think Fast and SlowIn 2011, Daniel Kahneman published a book that should have changed how every founder thinks about every decision they make.And, while it changed part...

Week 2: What Darwin Actually Said About Survival Everyone knows the phrase. Survival of the fittest.  Four words that have been applied to business, startups, markets, and competitive strategy so man...

Week 1: What Schumpeter Got Wrong About the Routinization of Innovation This series begins with Joseph Schumpeter because he identified the direction innovation was heading more clearly than anyone b...

The Foundations of Innovation Series  A year-long series on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from them all. For nearly a century, the greatest minds in economics,...