generative business

Generative Business Practice: Questions from Harvard’s Digital Initiative

November 25, 2014

Tweet I got lots of feedback from the folks who participated in the HBS Digital Initiative seminar where I presented some big picture ideas about generative practices.   As promised, I’m summarizing what they shared with me on the index cards we used to gather up ideas. While I was so. glad. that I asked […]

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Only Transparent AND Open Practices Generate Opportunity For Your Network

June 24, 2014

Tweet Businesses need to be both transparent and open to create opportunities for themselves and their entire network.   Yet even though we know that  qualities like “open” and “transparent” are preconditions for innovation, we often aren’t clear about what these terms actually mean. Sometimes people even use the terms interchangeably, as though what’s transparent and what’s open are […]

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Why Be Disruptive, When You Can Be Generative? Friday Afternoon with MakeLoveNotPorn

May 23, 2014

Tweet Some businesses aim to make money. Some businesses aim to disrupt their industries. The very best businesses aim even higher — to generate new opportunity for each and every stakeholder. It was Friday afternoon clean-up-my-office time. That ‘end of the year, has it come down to this?’-moment of reckoning. Maybe while I sort out piles and […]

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Are All Generative Businesses a Little Naughty? The case of MakeLoveNotPorn

April 3, 2014

Tweet No startup challenges our norms about ‘appropriate business’ more than MakeLoveNotPorn. MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP) is a user-generated crowdsourced video platform that celebrates “real world sex”. MLNP is a legal, lucrative, and liberatory disruptor of the adult entertainment industry. It’s also a profoundly generative business. MLNP is generative not because it’s naughty, but because of how it’s […]

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Generativity, in General

March 28, 2014

Tweet The word ‘generative’ may be unfamiliar to many business people, but the quality of generativity is something we’ve sought in our companies and our work practices for a long time.   Something is generative when it’s able to create something new, something original, or something alive. A generative idea produces new ideas, a generative process […]

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Three Design Principles for Generative Business

March 20, 2014

Tweet As I was being nudged to consider whether the term “boost” really captured the central dynamic of generative businesses, I realized that it actually only represented the very first element of what it takes to be generative. Note: Since this is more like an essay than a post, I’ve added some jumps so that […]

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What Makes Digital Tech Companies Models of Generativity?

March 13, 2014

Tweet Buffer, WordPress, AirBnB, Waze, LoveWithFood, ModCloth, Etsy— so many of the organizations I’m using as examples of generative businesses share a similar profile: They are relatively small, young, organized around a core software process or product, filled with coders and developers, and part of a specific tech community. Why is generativity such a defining […]

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5 Reasons Why Generative Businesses Are So Powerful

March 6, 2014

Tweet I’d rather help one organization become generative than help a dozen organizations become ‘great’. Why? Because one generative organization has more positive impact on the world than a whole industry of organizations that are efficient, excellent, profitable, and self-focused. For generative businesses, neither the size nor the direction of their impact is accidental.  Here […]

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How Can We Boost Other Businesses Through Our Products? Initial Ideas

September 12, 2013

Tweet Ever since I fell in love with the concepts behind APIs, I’ve been on the lookout for ways that companies can boost others through how they conceptualize, create and distribute their own products. There’s a traditional way that we think of products as ‘boosting’ others, which is simply by having that product do what […]

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