The Innovation Booster #7

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 unleashing creativity through play, creating strategic clarity, thinking about confidence, the importance of measuring cost of failure, and being demanding:

1. Unlock Ingenuity through Play by Paul Sloane. Having developed Playing Lean, an award winning board game for teaching innovation, it should come at no surprise that I am a proponent of leveraging games and playing of improving businesses, products, and results. Paul offers a great explanation of how play works well in business environment through pattern disruption.
2. The Living Strategy by Holger Nils Pohl. A good strategy is a mixture of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge. Strategy formulation process should results with alignment and decisions, but it most often results with nothing but a document. Holger shares a process to achieve the former.
3. Lost confidence by Jason Cohen. Corporate innovation is about investing in a portfolio of initiatives of varying risk profiles and differing upsides (ideally attractive). We make decisions based on assumptions and educated guesses about the final outcome, with certain level of confidence. This confidence should be built on evidence and insight derived from experimentation. But we still, in essence, make an informed guess about the confidence level itself. Jason shares his process, and why he switched from attempting to quantify confidence to focusing on customer impact instead.
4. Why “Cost of Failure” Is One of the Most Important Innovation Accounting KPIs by Dan Toma. Paying attention to cost of failure helps us surface gaps in experimentation skills, directs executives to fund experiments and exploration instead of "winners," measure cost of learning, and determine realistic goals for innovation ROI. Dan offers few more reasons as well.
5. On being demanding by Bruno Pešec [subscriber exclusive]. High innovation performance, high standards, high demands: these are all needed to attain excellence. But there is more than one way to achieve so, and more importantly, achieve so without being demeaning.

Mastering Innovation Management

If you are measured on innovation results, this programme addresses the root cause of failure: the absence of actively managing innovation investments. Through twelve strategic deep dives, you will master innovation boards, portfolios, accounting, and more. Click here for details.

The Living Strategy

What do you do when the plan no longer fits and the decision cannot wait? Join Holger Nils Pohl and me in Cologne on 7 October to find out. Three hours, hands-on, small group of senior peers. Early bird €300 while it lasts. Register here.

Playing Lean Facilitator Training

If you help others learn how to innovate, this is for you. Join me in Frankfurt on 12 October for a full day of Playing Lean Facilitator Training: hands-on practice, personal feedback, certification, and the complete facilitator toolkit. €400 until 12 September. Register here.