What is innovation?
- Corporate innovation means discovering sustainable new business models
- Common myths about innovation
Challenges facing innovation
- Loss aversion creates tension between the need to innovate and the need to protect the status quo in large organizations
- Avoid performative innovation
- Established organizations tend to optimize for inertia
- Methods used to innovate in a startup environment are poorly suited for the enterprise
- Organizations change more slowly than technology
- Common innovation anti-patterns
- Promoting top performs to management roles limits organizational effectiveness - Organizations often promote top performers out of positions in which they can make the greatest impact.
- Innovation can't be measured against the same KPIs as the core business - Established orgs may attempt to measure innovation against the same measures it uses to evaluate its core business; this is an anti-pattern and can stifle innovation due to a difference in objectives
Innovation thrives on connection
- Integrate innovation functions with the broader organization
- Innovation cascades
- Ideas are constellations
- Innovation accrues in small, incremental steps.
- Innovation needs on-ramps to the core business
Finding opportunities for innovation
- Change happens gradually, then suddenly.
- Inflection points reveal themselves first at the edges
- Strategic inflection points disrupt the underlying assumptions of a business or industry
- OODA Loop
- Base strategy on leading, not lagging, indicators
- Abductive reasoning infers explanation from observation
- Our vision of the future is always constrained by our view of the past.
De-risking innovation
- De-risk innovation by making smaller bets
- Work backwards from a long-term vision of the future to define proximate objectives
- Optimize for invalidating ideas.
- Fund innovation against specific incremental goals
Innovation operations
- Traditional product roadmaps encourage confirmation bias
- Innovation is management as much as it is creativity
- Leading innovation requires providing a vision and facilitating its execution
- Innovation can't be measured against the same KPIs as the core business