Welcome to the world, SparcHub!

Rita McGrath
6 min readApr 10, 2024

After 8 years since founding Valize, 4 changes of software approaches, more than 50 iterations of my Columbia Executive Education program “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” and 5 books, the software designed to make managing the innovation process easier and more transparent is ready to make its debut.

There was never an app for that!

Discovery driven planning, the article that introduced the idea that has later found its way into many innovation methodologies, including Lean Startup, was published in 1995. The idea was further explored in my year 2000 book “The Entrepreneurial Mindset” (hint: do not publish a book with entrepreneurship in the title after one of the greatest entrepreneurial disasters of all time, the dot.com crash). “Discovery Driven Growth,” a book-length treatment of the concepts in the original article came out in 2009 (hint: do not publish a book with “growth” in the title after one of the greatest economic crashes of all time). Over the years, the concepts in these books and my other research have found their way into the curriculum for my “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” program which I have been leading at Columbia Business School since 1999.

There was gratifying recognition of the importance of the concept (most proudly for me, an acknowledgement by Clayton Christensen that it was “one of the most…

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Rita McGrath
Rita McGrath

Written by Rita McGrath

Columbia Business School Professor. Thinkers50 top 10 & #1 in strategy. Bestselling author of The End of Competitive Advantage & Seeing Around Corners.

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