The Innovation Booster #6

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 corporate innovation, performance management, creativity constraints, durable business models, and enduring primacy of demand:

1. Corporate Innovation Governance: A Practical Guide. Article 4 — Lessons learnt from launching an innovation vehicle (what actually makes it work) by Susana Jurado Apruzzese. Last post in Susana's series of sharing her experience with corporate innovation at Telefónica. Her lessons learned are very much aligned with best practice I have seen amongst my clients: have clear innovation objectives, be aligned with business strategy, experiment, ensure top management support, measure value (mandatory), focus on culture and processes.
2. Why Traditional Performance Management Kills Innovation by Cris Beswick. We want to reward good behaviours and results. We want to discourage bad behaviours and results. Cris makes a compelling argument that contemporary approach to assessing and managing performance is ill-suited for developing a culture of innovation.
3. Customer Outcomes Are the Constraint That Makes Your Team More Creative by Urquhart Wood. Most people feel overwhelmed when staring at a blank canvas, white space, or open field. "Think outside the box" is only useful if you know what the box is. Hence, first step is to get intimate with the box and constraints it introduces, so creativity and imagination can be used to innovate. Urqo explains how customers' needs can be leveraged as constraints to drive creativity.
4. Amazon’s Durability by Ben Thompson. Although many articles, case studies, and books have been written about Amazon and Jeff Bezos, I find that most still miss one of the fundamental, simple truths: Amazon's best business were built on fixing their own problem(s) and then monetising that. AWS is the best example. In this post Ben provides a good summary, and then shares his thoughts on what might Amazon be aiming for with its AI investments.
5. On Why Demand Trumps Everything by Bruno Pešec [subscriber exclusive]. We know how bad innovation process looks like: solution in a search of a problem. And yet we keep repeating the same mistake. Recent investments by OpenAI and Anthropic show the same pattern at unprecedented scale in billions of dollars. In this article I draw a parallel with a salesman from the 19th century and why demand still reigns supreme.

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