World-Class Research, Real-World Insights
Our work builds on four decades of research by our founders, Professor Michael Tushman (Harvard Business School), Professor Charles O’Reilly (Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Andy Binns. Change Logic has extended this research, building a practical toolkit that marries research to practical application. We are published regularly in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the California Management Review. We collaborate with client CEOs on many of our research projects, helping to bring real world insight into our work.
Founders Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly, and Andrew Binns
CHANGE LOGIC TEAM AUTHORED BOOKS
Corporate Explorer Fieldbook:
How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies
Andrew Binns and Eugene Ivanov
In the Corporate Explorer Fieldbook, a team of renowned innovation and change experts delivers an indispensable companion to the newly published Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game. In the book, you’ll find the tools, methodologies, and techniques you need to convert a great idea into a thriving, profitable business.
Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game
Andrew Binns, Charles O’Reilly, and Michael Tushman
Corporate Explorers are the new heroes of the corporate world who turn disruption into opportunity. They are part entrepreneurs, using innovation disciplines to jump start cutting-edge ideas, and part change leaders, capable of creating support for investment. They see that corporations already own the ideas, resources, and—critically—the talent to build new ventures. Entrepreneurs take notice—it’s time for Corporate Explorers to set the pace and chart the course for disruption.
Lead and Disrupt
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman
Lead and Disrupt discusses how established firms can beat the odds of disruption by adopting an ‘ambidextrous organization’. An ambidextrous organization plays two games. It both Leads in Core markets and Disrupts Explore. Using examples from firms like Amazon, IBM, and Cisco, O’Reilly and Tushman describe how a succession of firms have put in place a systematic approach to moving into new market areas, without losing focus on the existing core business franchise.
Industry Leading Whitepapers
Building Corporate Ventures: People, Teams, and Culture
Andrew Binns
Corporate innovation has long been a misfit inside existing business. Corporate innovation teams battle for resources and attention, yet often lose out to slower growing but more profitable operating businesses. CEOs want to be more innovative, but the high costs and high uncertainty of the innovation process tend to make them cautious. As a result, corporate innovation is an area of high activity and low productivity, with relatively few corporations achieving standout results.
We are living in a moment of extraordinary technological change. Companies are spending billions on generative AI, graphene, quantum computing, and a dozen other emerging technologies. These breakthroughs have the potential to upend entire industries. Converting such opportunities does not require better methods – there is no gap in our knowledge. What we need are the people, teams, and culture that can play the same role inside corporations that entrepreneurs play for startups.
Busting The Myths Of Corporate Innovation
Andrew Binns
Conventional wisdom is that corporations should not even try to lead disruptive innovation, that slow, established organizations cannot hope to compete with the speed and ingenuity of startups, despite having greater financial and technological assets. There is no question that large companies struggle with radical innovation and startups often win.
We believe corporations can beat start-ups at the innovation game, building successful, new ventures using the assets of the existing company to accelerate their work. Standing in their way is a set of myths about corporate innovation that sound like common sense. In reality, they obscure the path to success, making the work of the corporation much harder than it needs to be.
This ebook explores the most common and significant myths, presenting evidence for why they are flawed, and describing the implications that can help make corporate explorers more successful.
Six Breakdowns in the Process for Disruptive Innovation
Andrew Binns
Change Logic has over fifteen years of experience helping companies beat the odds and build disruptive new businesses. Based on our research and practical experience, we have isolated the six most common breakdowns in the process for disruptive innovation. This whitepaper outlines where organizations struggle most, ways to proactively avoid common innovation pitfalls, how leading companies overcame obstacles to innovation, and how to increase the odds of success.
Beating the Odds of Disruption
Andy Binns, Christine Griffin, and Aaron Leopold
Large firms often struggle to prosper in the face of market disruption. Recently, many have adopted Design Thinking and ‘Lean Agile’ techniques, but have these techniques moved the needle towards building disruptive new businesses? Are incumbents any better placed to beat disruption? And, if some are, what can we learn about how they’ve succeeded where others have failed? In this white paper, we conducted research from interviews with 30 firms and over 150 executives to find the answers.
Forbes Articles
March 17, 2022: Six Ways To Shine As A Workplace Rebel And Not Be A Jerk
February 14, 2022: Silent Killer Of Exploration: How Culture Kills Innovation
October 27, 2021: Can Corporate Explorers Save Companies From The Startup Threat
June 17, 2021: Is Your Innovation Breaking Down?
Fast Company Articles
August 17, 2023: Enterprise Architects: Friend Or Foe Of Corporate Innovation?
August 4, 2023: BMW Is Spending Money On Pet Technology Projects Not On Solving Customer Problems
July 26, 2023: Why Overinvesting In Generative AI Could Be A Trap
Additional Publications & Articles
The Missing Discipline Behind Failure to Scale
Andy Binns and Christine Griffin
Companies make significant investments in developing and incubating new business initiatives, but too few follow a rigorous path to scaling their ventures.
Winning through Innovation
Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly
Winning Through Innovation provides a methodology for organizational change using the award-winning Congruence Model. The method explains how firms define performance or opportunity gaps, diagnose root causes of these problems, and design actions to address them. The book is the foundation for Tushman and O’Reilly’s executive education program, Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, which has been running at the Harvard and Stanford business schools for almost thirty years.
Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People
Charles O’Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer
Culture is often regarded as both the most important and least understood aspect of organizations. In Hidden Value, Charles O’Reilly and co-author Jeff Pfeffer make culture a tangible and practical instrument of leadership. They describe how a variety of organizations design mechanisms that make culture a source of competitive advantage, aligned tightly to the company’s business model, and a key reason for business success.
The Three Stages of Disruptive Innovation
Andy Binns and Charles O’Reilly
In this award-winning California Management review article, Binns and O’Reilly describe the research underpinning Change Logic’s approach to Ideation, Incubation, and Scaling new businesses in established organizations. They highlight how the many methodologies for Ideation and Incubation tend to ignore the challenges of converting great ideas into successful revenue streams. Using case studies from IBM and Amazon, they explain the mechanisms for putting in place a repeatable process for new business creation.
“Both/And” Leadership
Wendy K. Smith, Marianne Lewis, and Michael L. Tushman
Leaders face a multitude of strategic paradoxes—contradictory pressures that are too often viewed as “either/or” choices. In “Both/And” Leadership authors argue that organizational success depends on simultaneously addressing such conflicting demands, not choosing between them. Leaders need to become comfortable with multiple truths and inconsistency. They need to assume that resources are ample rather than scarce. And they need to embrace change instead of seeking stability.
The Art of Strategic Renewal
Andy Binns, Charles O’Reilly, Bruce Harreld and Michael Tushman
The enormous literature on change management focuses almost exclusively on the problem of leading change in a crisis. What do you do if there is no ‘burning platform’, but there is a compelling opportunity to pursue? In this MIT Sloane Management Review article, Change Logic’s founders describe a series of case studies, drawing on the experience of clients as well as research, where leaders made proactive pivots, rather than waiting for a performance crisis before they act.
The Ambidextrous CEO
Wendy Smith, Michael Tushman, and Andy Binns
Senior teams are a key success factor for firms that add new sources of growth to an existing core. Decisions to invest beyond the core business are often controversial and there is a strong disincentive for established business unit leaders to support them. This Harvard Business Review article uses deep research from a range of firms to unlock the secrets of how leaders manage the senior team to overcome these pressures.
Organizational Ambidexterity: IBM and the Emerging Business Opportunities
Charles O’Reilly, Bruce Harreld, and Michael Tushman
A foundational story for Change Logic, the IBM Emerging Business Opportunity program created twenty-three new businesses for the corporation between 2000 and 2010. The outcome was an engine of organic growth that outperformed all of IBM’s M&A activity for the same period. This award-winning California Management Review article explores the design of the EBOs, how they were executed, and the impact hat they had on the corporation in this period.
Organizational Ambidexterity in Action: How Managers Explore and Exploit
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman
Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity, the ability of senior managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration of existing assets to overcome inertia and path dependence, is a core dynamic capability. Using interviews and qualitative case studies from thirteen organizations, this important California Review Management article explores the actions senior managers took to implement ambidextrous designs and identify which ones helped or hindered them in their attempts.
Winner of the AMP Decade Paper Award
Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman
Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years there has been an explosion of interest and research on this topic. We briefly review the current state of the research, highlighting what we know and don’t know about the topic. We close with a point of view on promising areas for ongoing research.
Winner of the 2023 AMP Decade Paper Award for Academy of Management Perspectives
Change Logic works with senior executives in established firms to renew their organization and align them for growth.
Change Logic Awarded Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Award. Learn More >