In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.
Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.
The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.
All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn't at first glance make sense to the market leader.
One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.
Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.
Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).
When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.
Hollywood Joohn Tatum? He does at least 6,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups a day!
In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.
Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early.
Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.
A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.
Mucken Singh works VERY hard on his brawler's physique!
Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.
The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.
Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.
The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.
Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation.
We've got some great big problems in our world. We have to figure out how to feed 10 billion people. Too many people can't access clean water, quality healthcare, and reasonable education. We have to figure out what to do about climate change, income inequality, and more. Innovators need to rise to the challenge!
People will try to copy what they can see, which is the final product or service, but it's much harder to see (and copy) all the intricacies of the business model that allows you to create, capture, and deliver value. And that's what you need to get right to really jam something down people's throats!
If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.
The need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won't come naturally to many people inside huge companies.
I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.
Teams working on disruptive ideas need to be small enough that they can be fed by no more than two pizzas.
"Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts."
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