The Innovation Booster #2

The Innovation Booster is a monthly periodical bringing you five great reads on innovation, strategy, and growth that will inspire you to act, kick off your creativity, and challenge you to think differently.

In this issue of The Innovation Booster I feature great reads on big decisions, strategic flexibility, importance of systemic discovery, measuring innovation, and improving innovation performance through environs:

1. High Stakes by Andrew Hollo. Innovation initiatives come in all shapes and forms, hence it is vital understanding how they fit in the overall innovation portfolio. Some might be structural, massive, high-stakes investments. Others migh be smaller, almost incremental in nature. Realising which is which is pivotal to governing them properly. Andrew exemplifies both cases wonderfully through Metro Rail Tunnel and Grand Slam.
2. Three Reasons to keep Investing in Ideas not Aligned with Strategy by Dan Toma. Innovation strategy is dynamic, and we should be able to recognise moments when flexibility is needed for a promising idea or due to extenuating circumstances. Dan offers three special cases when it might make sense to invest into unaligned ideas.
3. The Hidden Reason Teams Can’t Learn Why Their Products Fail by Urquhart Wood. Jumping straight into solutions remains one of the top innovation blunders, despite proliferation of methods like Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Outcome Driven Innovation. Understanding, but really understanding the customer's needs, jobs-to-be-done, and desired outcomes is the prerequisite for creating innovations that can generate outsized value. Urko illustrates the benefits of doing systemic discovery before designing solutions.
4. How to Prove Innovation Value Early (and Keep Stakeholders With You) by Susie Braam. Measuring innovation efforts and outcomes is a topic that is very close to my heart. I've written extensively on innovation metrics, contributed to the Innovation Accounting book, and wrote a book on leveraging data to make the best possible decisions. Susie focuses on differentiating leading and lagging indicators for each organisational role, offering a "starter" set of measures.
5. On Importance of Environment by Bruno Pešec [subscriber exclusive]. When it comes to innovation, environment has much more positive impact on the organisation’s innovation performance than focusing on any single one individual. Therefore, by changing and shaping the environment, we can directly influence our odds of innovating successfully.

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