The innovation engine in most companies is broken, burning large quantities of fuel, generating lots of heat and smoke, but doing precious little to accelerate company growth beyond a few sputtering lurches.
Most efforts to boost innovation focus on generating or capturing new ideas. Yet for most companies, this is not where the problem lies. Instead the problem lies in determining which of those ideas can be successfully scaled into profitable new lines of business. Most companies place big bets on the wrong ideas for the wrong reasons. As a consequence, 9 out of 10 new products fail.
We’ve been collaborating with a number of large enterprises who are pioneering the use of lean startup techniques to make better investment decisions and reduce the risks of new product failure. Through this work, a new model has started to emerge that promises to turbocharge enterprise innovation efforts to generate explosive growth.
Next Sunday at Tech Week, Chicago’s largest digital innovation conference, I’ll be sharing some of our lessons learned in a talk titled Building a Better Enterprise Innovation Engine.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
- How a lean innovation approach provides a more efficient way to determine which ideas merit further development and to rapidly bring the right ones to product/market fit.
- How business model analysis, rapid cycles of hypothesis testing using minimal experiments and feedback from real customers can help you decide when to pivot, when to persevere, and when to allocate your innovation budget to other ideas.
- How to manage an innovation portfolio to maximize returns
- How to staff an innovation department
If you’re interested, you can sign up at Techweek – the lineup of speakers is very impressive. You can use discount code twspeakers_30 to save $115 on admission.
If you’re unable to attend but would like to find out more, drop us a line.