William Fischer

Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management

William A Fischer is Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management. He co-founded and co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and authors a regular column for Forbes entitled The Ideas Business.

An engineer by training, American by citizenship, Fischer has lived much of his life in Asia and Europe. He held a full professorship and endowed chair on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1976-1998), first moved to China in 1980, and later became President of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai (1997-1999). In 1999, he was awarded the Magnolia Silver Award, Shanghai’s highest award for foreigners contributing to the city’s development.

He first joined IMD in 1990 and was part of the team that developed the Managerial Deep Dive process for improved innovation conversations. His most recent books include Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier has Changed the Way that Big Companies Transform (with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu), and, with Andy Boynton, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen (2011), and Virtuoso Teams (2005). All of these books address issues of innovation, talent development, and expression in a variety of organizational settings.

Over the past few years, Fischer has also been recognized by a variety of sources for his professional presence on Twitter and as a leading innovation blogger.

Academic publications
Article
Out of this world high performing teams: A video tour
The article discusses how lessons applicable to executive education can be taken from the motion picture "Apollo 13," the musical "West Side Story," and the jazz musician Miles Davis. The authors f...
Published 1 January 2007
Article
Organisational slack and new product time to market performance
Using archival data from two different industries, this paper examines the relationship between organisational slack and new product time to market performance. Prior research has shown that there ...
Published 23 October 2017
Insight for Executives
Article
Why Louis Vuitton’s choice of Pharrell Williams as men’s creative director is so inspired
Louis Vuitton’s choice of Pharrell Williams as its new creative director for men’s fashions, and to assume the role that became vacant with the tragic loss of Virgil Abloh. In yesterday’s announce...
Published 15 February 2023
Article
What’s up with disruption?
Maybe, the most important thing that’s up with disruption, these days, is the amount of attention it is receiving. Depicted in the image above, which is derived from searching for “Disruptive Innov...
Published 10 January 2023
Article
What’s stopping you from reinventing your career?
A recent Microsoft study of 30,000 people revealed that 46% of workers are considering a major career pivot or transition after the Covid years. For many, this search goes beyond just a change of r...
Published 27 October 2022
Article
March-madness in october: Business model innovation scores big
Business model innovation is the hottest topic today in innovation conversations, despite its being so seemingly invisible, even to the point of being overlooked in many innovation-measurement sche...
Published 10 October 2022
Article
Disruption is alive and well, from dairy to hearing aids to EVs
Disruption continues to be a familiar topic in today’s C-suite; almost always spoken about in hushed tones, with frequent glances over one’s shoulder, as if the inevitable is about to arrive at any...
Published 1 September 2022
Article
Revitalizing an iconic American market leader: The transformation of GE appliances
There may be no more iconic American brand than General Electric Appliances. After all, an American President, Ronald Reagan, built a large part of his public visibility selling the very idea that ...
Published 29 June 2022
Article
Leadership in an ecosystem age: Secrets for success
Ecosystems have become the hottest new idea in managerial conversations today. While the previous favorite, “disruption,” posed problems and suggested despair, ecosystems are all about solutions an...
Published 1 April 2022
Article
A new look for innovation: Less heroes, fewer processes
Today, as this is written, it is impossible to speak of heroism without acknowledging that real heroism has rarely been so abundantly visible as it is, at this very moment, in the streets of Ukrain...
Published 1 March 2022
Zhang Ruimin’s vision of leadership for the future
Article
Zhang Ruimin’s vision of leadership for the future
Look around! New technologies are dramatically changing nearly every facet of the world we live and work in. New business models designed to gain advantages from these technological changes are pro...
Published 9 February 2022
Article
Is it time to transform your organization’s culture?
Want to change the culture of your organization; give it a complete transformation? Who doesn't? But, when do you really know that the time is right for such an ambitious undertaking? At the core o...
Published 31 January 2022
Article
Steven Spielberg and the (re)making of ‘West Side Story’
Blood on the stage, racial tensions turned violent, dissonant music and serious dance: from the beginning, the whole idea of West Side Story was definitely a disconnect from conventional musical th...
Published 30 December 2021
Article
The future of golf: Whole in one, or sand trap?
The recent announcement by Greg Norman that his Saudi-funded partnership, LIV Golf Investment, will be investing $200 million into the Asian Tour, with a deliberate challenge of a Jeddah start on t...
Published 9 December 2021
Article
GE, Toshiba, J&J: Reorganizing is not transformation
Serious transformation is not for the faint-hearted, and, so, it isn’t every week that an iconic firm announces such an initiative. The week before this past week, three such organizations, GE, Tos...
Published 21 November 2021
Article
No managers, more leaders: The leadership legacy of Zhang Ruimin
The decision this morning by Mr. Zhang Ruimin, Chairman and CEO of the Haier Group, to not participate in the nomination of new directors, has taken many of his admirers by surprise. The long-servi...
Published 5 November 2021
Article
From DoorDash to Huawei: Business model revolution
It used to be that we could excuse most CEO’s for not being more involved or supportive of innovation, because they typically did not come from a technical background. That excuse became invalid wh...
Published 29 September 2021
Article
Ferrari puts the future in the driver's seat
The importance of the people at the top of an organization to launch or suppress transformational change is hard to deny. Despite a popularity for true bottom-up revolution, the catalyst for change...
Published 30 June 2021
Article
Europe’s super football league: Business model failure, leadership debacle
We are living in a golden age of business model innovation. Look around, business models are disrupting industries everywhere around you: traditional news media are being challenged by subscription...
Published 21 April 2021
Article
Leadership lessons from a year of Covid-19
It’s been more than a year, now, and the Covid-19 pandemic, instead of just disappearing, is still very much a part of our lives. We are well over one hundred million total cases having occurred wo...
Published 26 March 2021
Article
In the new year : Learn more, not less
Think you can’t learn less? Close your eyes, plug your ears, hold your nose. See, already you are learning less: less about what’s going on around you; less about your partners and less about yours...
Published 4 January 2021
Article
Led by data, algorithms and AI?
Imagine a world where it is acknowledged that unknown unknowns are the primary triggers of economic and social change; where literally everything is recognized to be an “accident” (in the statisti...
Published 20 November 2020
Article
Good ideas don't last forever
There are scores of good books devoted to where new ideas come from, but when did you last see anything about where do old ideas go to? There is danger when we are not mindful of an idea’s inherent...
Published 11 October 2020
Article
How to reposition for uncertain outcomes
Covid-19 has taught us all one thing: We are now in the world of the unknown. In the past, things might have been uncertain in your business. In the uncertain, even if there are variables at play, ...
Published 1 October 2020
A discussion on business model innovation with Bill Fischer and Alexander Osterwalder
Video
A discussion on business model innovation with Bill Fischer and Alexander Osterwalder
IMD innovation expert Bill Fischer discusses the journey of the Business Model Canvas with its originator
Published 22 February 2019
From PhD to boardrooms – interview with Alex Osterwalder, inventor of the Business Model Canvas
Article
From PhD to boardrooms – interview with Alex Osterwalder, inventor of the Business Model Canvas
IMD innovation expert Bill Fischer discusses the journey of the Business Model Canvas with its originator
Published 22 February 2019
It takes more than members to make a team
Article
It takes more than members to make a team
Teams are essential engines of change that make them critically important organizational and societal assets. How well they function is a measure of how well we utilize our talent resources. IMD Pr...
Published 22 February 2019
How Haier gives insights into China’s radical transformation
Article
How Haier gives insights into China’s radical transformation
IMD Professor William A. Fischer gives insights into China’s radical transformation
Published 4 February 2019
Every innovation needs a story
Article
Every innovation needs a story
Innovation can never just be about the technology. It must have an empathetic view of the audience and it must speak to their needs. Often entrepreneurs are desperately in love with their ideas and...
Published 18 October 2018
Legacy thinking is transforming us into can’t do guys
Article
Legacy thinking is transforming us into can’t do guys
After more than 150 years of creating electric light, heavier-than-air, flying machines, communications systems that span the world, enormous computer power that fits in our pockets, vaccines that ...
Published 27 July 2018
Why we can’t innovate
Article
Why we can’t innovate
“Ad Hoc, slow, short-term, insular.” That’s the overall characterization of corporate innovation processes that appears in a recent “State of Innovation” report by CB Insights, based on a survey of...
Published 24 May 2018
The compelling attractiveness of fewer ideas
Article
The compelling attractiveness of fewer ideas
How many ideas did Jack Welch need to unleash to reinvent General Electric in the 1980s, as the Cold War wound down and the world economy approached major technological and geo-political inflection...
Published 20 October 2017
The final frontier of disruptive innovation
Article
The final frontier of disruptive innovation
It was the great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald who ventured the opinion that “there are no second acts in American lives”, at a time, ironically, “when he himself was only a couple of years a...
Published 28 September 2017
The death of strategy
Article
The death of strategy
In a world of never-ending change, it’s either one or the other; we can no longer count on having both. As innovation accelerates its assault on what we formerly referred to as “our planning proces...
Published 9 December 2016
Article
How Chinese companies disrupt through business model innovation
Experts continue to debate whether Chinese businesses are truly disruptive. For some industries in the West, this question appears a bit ridiculous. The American textile and apparel industries, for...
Published 8 July 2016
We are failing at failing
Article
We are failing at failing
We don’t fail enough; we need to fail faster, fail bigger, fail more often; convince our leaders that failure is acceptable. It’s almost as if we are saying that: “if only we were more accomplished...
Published 13 April 2016
Haier and GE: understanding the magic behind the deal
Article
Haier and GE: understanding the magic behind the deal
The “partnership” is more important than acquiring the appliance business. If you read the announcements, Haier and GE are entering into an agreement “to cooperate globally and jointly pursue growt...
Published 21 January 2016
Article
The Haier road to growth
Start with 30 million responses on social media platforms to the question: "What do you want in air conditioning?" Then pay attention to the more than 670,000 people who take part in the online con...
Published 27 April 2015
Article
Dealing with a hands-off boss
Having a hands-off manager can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, these bosses give employees considerable initiative and empowerment. On the other hand, they can sometimes be so removed from th...
Published 17 December 2014
Article
Unlock employee innovation that fits with your strategy
In innovation circles, empowerment is now a familiar theme; project teams working highly autonomously have been behind many of the world’s most innovative offerings. But my work with colleagues stu...
Published 27 October 2014
The idea hunter
Article
The idea hunter
Idea hunting starts with finding your gig. A gig, in the business context, could be the focal point of your personal brand, professional identity or a company’s strategic issues. The process of fin...
Published 5 February 2013
Article
Innovating the iPod
Seldom has a single technological innovation affected so many markets at once - the music industry, hardware vendors, the labour market, artists and consumers themselves. This is the story of how t...
Published 7 April 2011
Article
Reinventando a mentalidade administrativa
Published 30 June 2009
Reinventing the managerial mindset
Article
Reinventing the managerial mindset
The 20th Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie opens in Geneva from January 18 through January 22. It comes off a year in which the Swiss watch manufacturers, battered by the world recession, ...
Published 12 March 2009
Article
Virtuoso teams
High-stakes projects need all-star teams. But all-stars often play by their own rules - and fight like cats and dogs.
Published 1 August 2005
Article
Stephen King and the publishing industry's worst nightmare
Horror-writer Stephen King set out to give the publishing industry its biggest shock ever-by selling a book over the Internet at $1 a chapter. Things didn't go all King's way; not everyone paid for...
Published 1 August 2002
The Idea Hunter
Book
The Idea Hunter
A different way of discovering and developing the best business ideas. Jack Welch once said, 'Someone, somewhere has a better idea.' In this myth-busting book, the authors reveal that great busines...
Published 1 January 0001
Reinventing Giants
Book
Reinventing Giants
A compelling profile of an emerging Chinese competitor Chinese firms are reinventing their business models, their corporate cultures, and themselves, becoming global competitors who increasingly of...
Published 1 January 0001
How Chinese global competitor Haier has changed the way big companies transform
Reinventing Giants