Watch this space for photos and news from the event …

“I was asked by Jean-Bernard Guerree, the Founder of the i7 Summit, to set the tone of the Summit by introducing something that would get people thinking differently,” stated Nicholas. “Having worked with multiple organizations in a variety of countries, one of the great take-aways for me has been that you can use Blue Ocean Strategy for developing your people. So I thought I would talk about the way in which Blue Ocean Strategy can change the way you view your business environment as a way to get everyone in the right frame of mind.”

The Summit was sponsored by CapGemini in the chateau Les Fontaines, located inChantilly,France. Over 150 people from around the globe were present, including investors from Silicon Valley, Paris, Tokyo, London, Budapest, Amsterdam, Dubai, Moscow and Munich.  These investors were joined by ventures from the EU including Spain, Finland, Lithuania, France, UK, the US with corporate investors from all over Europe.  Adrian Johnson who was a moderator at the i7 Summit said that “the i7 Summit is an inspiring conference in a great location. The combination of the Rothschildian nineteenth century chateau and the twenty-first century glass and steel architecture is elegant and creative,  reflecting the innovative nature of this summit – bringing together investors and entrepreneurs from around the world”.

The number of people from Silicon Valley who attended the Summit was impressive. There were many high powered investors, including Jim Smith, General Partner at Morh Davidow, Toyokazu (Kaz) Terada, Managing Director of Itochu Technology Ventures (Tokyo), Zoltan Bruckner, Managing Partner at Primus Capital Venture Management (Budapest), Michael Jeon, Head of Europe, Samsung Ventures, Joerg Sievert, Partner at SAP Ventures (Munich) and including Tim Draper, a General Partner and Founder of the global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Juvetson, an early investor in Hotmail and yahoo! and one of the most widely known investors inSilicon Valleywho joined by video conference.

Nicholas ended by saying, “for me it was a very successful event, because we were exposed to what is taking place in the venture capital and entrepreneurship communities around the globe. At the i7 Summit you really get to know people well and make good connections, not just exchange business cards.”

If you are interested in hearing more about how Blue Ocean Strategy can play a role in Entrepreneurship, come hear Nicholas Sadron speak at the Silicon Valley Comes to the Baltics event on the 15th and 16th of November in Vilnius, Lithuania.  Alternatively you can sign up the Strategy Regeneration’s Innovation as a Core Competence event in London on Thursday, October 25th at the Institute of Directors in London.

Strategy Regeneration – Empowering You to Innovate!

Professor Michael Shiel, PhD will lead the workshop designed for executives who are interested in innovation and cultural change, including heads of Strategy and Innovation, Business Units, Marketing and HR.

Price per seat is 150 pounds sterling per person or 750 pounds sterling for a table of 6.

If you are interested in attending please contact Donald Martin at: Donald.Martin@StrategyRegeneration.com

Strategy Regeneration – “Empowering You to Innovate!”

“Value up for the customer and cost down for the company is an enticing selling point for any company, Indian or otherwise” stated Chaitanya Kalipatnapu CEO of Eruditus. “That is why we partnered with Strategy Regeneration regarding their business development in India, because we know the value proposition of the Blue Ocean Strategy and what a profound effect it can have on a market like India.”

This is the 4th time in a year that SRg has been to India and they are returning yet again at the end of July for follow-up meetings. “We believe that India is the right kind of market for Blue Ocean Strategy,” said Peter Hessey, Managing Director of Strategy Regeneration, “not because of the size of the market, but because of where the mind set of the the managers are in India right now. They know that they have challenging issues, that the markets are changing and that they have to think differently if they want to be competitive, and we believe that we can help them with this challenge due to our experience.”

Katherine Twaddell an Associate of Strategy Regeneration was quick to add that “the people who attended the two events helped us to confirm that they can benefit from the value innovation process.” At each of the events Professor Jens Meyer and the team touched on some relative issues, which many Indian companies are facing today, such as companies growing in a commodity market, the need for organizational change, a desire to develop leaders and wanting to take more advantage of how they go about Corporate Social Responsibility.

Part of the SRg team will be back in both Mumbai and New Delhi for 4 days at the very end of July and early part of August. If you are interested in learning more about what SRg and would like to meet with the team please contact us at information@strategyregeneration.com.

Today’s healthcare industry is full of uncertainties. Many “blockbuster” drugs are coming off patent threatening the traditional pharmaceutical companies’ revenue model. Generics companies are a constant threat as well as rising healthcare costs and pressure from insurance companies. Even with an aging world population, tired state funding policies are not able to afford demand and an increased number of states are looking for better, cheaper healthcare solutions. In addition industry regulations are becoming more and more stringent making the environment even more competitive.

Top executives working for large international pharmaceutical companies face these daunting challenges everyday. Due to the number of hurdles these executives face on a day-to-day basis a sense of “everything is impossible” has begun to creep into the very fabric of the work ethic. Managers find themselves with teams whose knee-jerk reaction to any kind of innovation is “you can’t do that” or “that has already been tried and it did not work.” Employees talk about innovation as if it were some kind of elusive unobtainable exercise that only works for exceptional people with amazing forward thinking capabilities.

The Challenges of Innovation

Innovating within an organization is a messy process. Many people think that it takes vision to innovate, but that is only true when you know what the end result is supposed to be. Leading a company through the process of learning how to innovate and implementing with good results is an entirely different matter. It takes exceptional organizational skills, an ability to communicate and a good amount of courage.

Few executives are able or even willing to take on these challenges, mainly because they do not have an action plan to work from. The reason they do not have an action plan is because they are working from a classic strategy logic, which is deciding the end result and then determining how to get there. This is not how to innovate. Innovation means being comfortable with the unknown and not controlling where you are going but letting the exploration guide you and learn from that experience. Not many executives are willing to do this without a plan and rightfully so.

Who Has Been Innovating?

For the past five years a few intrepid individuals within major pharmaceutical companies (including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Janssen Cilag to name a few) have lead their organizations in an effort to lower costs while at the same time increase value for their companies through innovation. Faced with increasingly limited product pipelines, the death of the “blockbuster” model and mounting regulations, each one of these individuals understood the importance of changing the mindset within their companies, but without a crystal ball to reveal the future of their businesses it was difficult to know in which direction they should head. The main hurdle to overcome for each of these companies was based around creating value where none seemed possible. This meant tackling hard issues like Diabetes 2, Obesity, Cardiology, Pain Management, Mental Health, Cardiopulmonary Diseases and others.

What were the Results?

Innovation is a funny thing because it produces more than just new “products” or “services” it creates possibilities. One of the greatest results these companies experienced was that so many of the hurdles that had kept people from advancing with projects or ideas suddenly disappeared. The “can’t do” attitude started to be replaced with a more positive and energetic outlook of possibilities, which is contagious in an organization and in itself brings results.

Innovating also brought together colleagues from different divisions of the companies. So many projects are focused on one specific area of the company like finance, marketing, sales, supply chain management, etc. that they never are shared with the other divisions. Innovation is not a silo-based process it requires the experience and buy-in of people from the various divisions of the company all sharing their knowledge and experience.

The process of innovation in these particular cases worked because there was a structure and common language used among the teams. This structure created a sense of solidarity and helped the team members to explore the unknown spaces that make so many of us uncomfortable. It also created a link between people from different departments in the organization, which has had a ripple effect on later projects where people who went through the innovation process were better connected within the organization.

Innovation is not successful unless it is able to produce financial rewards to a company. In the case of our intrepid executives who dared take on the risks of innovating where it seemed impossible, each one of the projects undertaken created products or services that have been introduced into each company’s pipeline. This created a significant value for both stakeholders and shareholders alike. A company with future possibilities creates energy and excitement around the organization as possibilities breed belief that gains will be had from these innovative projects.

In an ever changing industry where uncertainty runs rampant those executives who dared to challenge the status quo through innovation succeeded. Their mandate was not to develop the next blockbuster drug, but rather to find a way to innovate with what was available within the company. This required them to embrace change. Those executives who are able to manage change are the ones who will be able to lead these organizations into the future profitably. As innovation is change.

Adrian Johnson, who lives in France, will be working on the Company’s online tools, media and web presence. Liz Jones, who is based in New York, will be working on Business Development for the US market as well as Organizational Development, which will help client companies to implement their value innovations. Donald Martin, who resides in Scotland, will be in charge of Business Development for the UK market as well as implementation. Katherine Twaddell, who is based in Singapore, will be conducting Business Development for Asia as well as Leadership Development for individual participant development.

“We are really very excited to have these four outstanding business professionals joining our team,” stated Michael Shiel, PhD., a Director of SRg, “they each have so much to offer with their varied business backgrounds and industries from which they are joining us. It is a very exciting prosect for our company.” Peter Hessey, the managing Director of SRg, added “With the coming on board of these four individuals we now have a global presence, which is important to SRg because for the past 4 years we have been working in the US, Europe and Asia. Now with our own team members on the ground we expect to be much more efficient and to be able to better serve our clients in their region.”

When asked what he thought about the advantages of adding four Principals to the team Professor Jens Meyer, a Director of Strategy Regeneration, said that “it is a compliment to an organization when someone who was your client wants to come and work for you because of the experience they had as a participant. We are extremely fortunate to have people joining us who have also been on the client side, who have gone through the program and who have lived the ups and downs of the process.”

“These are really exciting times for Strategy Regeneration,” Nicholas Sadron, a Director of the Company was heard saying, “not only because we have four new colleagues joining the company, each of whom has skills in different areas and each of whom are in a different geographic area, but really because they fit in so well with the rest of our small company. SRg’s strength has always been our diversity, a company of academics and business professionals from a variety of industries and nationalities, and Adrian, Liz, Donald and Katherine are an extension of that core structure.”

To learn more about Strategy Regeneration and how we can Empower You to Innovate, please visit our website at www.strategyregeneration.com.

Strategy Regeneration (SRg) recently completed its second program with Johnson & Johnson that was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Trust. This program proved to be unique to past programs as it not only brought together high potentials from within J&J’s business units (Medical, Pharmaceutical and Consumer Goods), but also incorporated executives from the Aga Khan Foundation as well as INSEAD MBAs. The two countries targeted for this year’s program were Kenya and Turkey.

Five teams, each team made up of roughly five J&J Executies, one Aga Kan Executive and one INSEAD MBA spent three months working together on issues such as Women’s Health, Poverty, and Infant Mortality. Guided by Jens Meyer, Peter Hessey, Adrian Johnson and Nicholas Sadron of Strategy Regeneration the five teams started their journey by researching the current health care landscape of both Kenya and Turkey. After a month of research, conference calls and meetings, three teams flew to Turkey and two teams flew to Kenya for 7 days of on the ground exploration.

Returning from their explorations in country the teams were bubbling over with insights and ways of tackling difficult issues in both countries. All of the teams had gone way off the normally beaten track of how to look at health care in these countries. They met with phone operators, food distributors, tribesmen and women, shop keepers, UN officials, local government organizations and religious groups. Nothing was off limits in their endeavor to find uncontested market space.

After three months of working together on the projects, on top of their day jobs and classes for the MBAs, the five groups came together in Neuss, Germany near the Johnson & Johnson offices to present their projects at the Visual Strategy Fair. Each team was given a few minutes to present a teaser to the audience of 150 executives from Johnson & Johnson, the Aga Khan Foundation, INSEAD professors and other invited stakeholders. After the teasers each of the teams manned booths that hosted videos, posters, photos, and mini-business plans of how they planned to attack their given topic in a unique, engaging and profitable way. One of the Kenyan teams constructed a thatched roofed hut for the audience to experience what life like is in rural Kenya. The energy during the visual fair was electric!

A voting system was put in place and at the closing dinner that evening the winning team was announced and given a bottle of champagne, which like at any Formula One winners circle was emmediately sprayed over the onlooking tables, including the top J&J executives. The atmosphere was full of cecelebration for the work completed and for the sense of accomplishment and team work.

Thanks to the dedication of 26 Johnson & Johnson executives, 5 Aga Khan Foundation executives, and 6 INSEAD MBAs people in Kenya and Turkey will be given opportunities to improve their own lives. And for that reason we at Strategy Regeneration would like to thank the Johnson & Johnson CSR Trust for giving us the opportunity to work on such an outstanding program and for their continued belief in the SRg process.

Many scholars’ work has pointed to the importance of embracing change in order for innovation to take place. Peter Drucker emphasizes the importance of understanding “noncustomers,” believing them to be the prime catalysts for change. Clayton Christensen describes organizational moves towards “noncustomers” as “disruptive innovation.” He notes that “a product or service designed for a new set of customers who are not being served by incumbents in the industry” eventually replaces the existing offer, leaving those organizations who ignored the new set of customers behind. On the Leadership side, John Kotter points out, “Leadership is about how to cope with rapid change.” Kotter also states, that “…leadership skills are not innate. They can be acquired, and honed.”

So how does an organization embrace change, develop leaders and innovate? It applies Blue Ocean Strategy. Why? Because Blue Ocean Strategy empowers organizations to innovate, prepares them to embrace the change, motivates employees at all levels, aligns people, and develops “leaders” who can guide the organization into the future, all the while making the organization more competitive.

To learn more about how the value innovation tools of Blue Ocean Strategy effect leadership development, please feel free to contact us at: info@strategyregeneration.com

Five teams lead by SRg coaches Peter Hessey, Nicholas Sadron and Adrian Johnson started working on their Deep Blue Ocean Projects in early September. Three teams will be going to conduct their exploration in Turkey, while the other two teams will be in Kenya. Last year there were six teams who went to three different countries, consisting of Abu Dhabi, Egypt and Tanzania.

“This year’s Deep Blue Ocean Program is really exciting for us,” stated Loic Sadoulet, Professor at INSEAD, “we were able to learn from last year’s explorations and increase the dynamics of the teams by bringing together J&J high-potentials, INSEAD MBAs, and Aga Khan Foundation Executives.”

Peter Hessey, the Managing Director of Strategy Regeneration, was noted as saying, “I really take my hat off to Johnson & Johnson’s CSR division for having the vision to not only run a Value Innovation Program, but to have learned from last year’s experience and brought the Aga Khan Development Network on board in search of enriching the program, not to mention the lives of millions of people these projects will affect in the future.”

“This year’s teams are feeling a different kind of pressure than last year’s teams,” stated Adrian Johnson, a new member of Strategy Regeneration, “because they have seen the positive results of last year’s projects. They know they have big shoes to fill.” Only a few weeks into this year’s Deep Blue Ocean Program the Strategy Regeneration coaches feel that their teams are running strong.

It is early days yet for the projects, but everyone, participants and stakeholders alike have high expectations.

If you would like to learn more about how you can use Value Innovation to innovate, change and lead please contact SRg at www.info@strategyregeneration.com