The Innovation Booster #11

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 change that works, measuring AI adoption, initial untested products, finding inspiration in nature, and growing innovation opportunities:

1. The AI Productivity Paradox: Why AI Is Everywhere Except in the Productivity Numbers by Greg Satell. "Here, go play with it" is unsurprisingly not a good strategy for figuring out how to use new transformative technology to improve the business and create more value. The battle-proven strategy has remained the same: find a real organisational issue, work on it together with the the people involved, and see if new technology can help it resolve better.
2. A Better Way to Measure AI Adoption: 12 KPIs That Link AI to Value by Dan Toma. A good companion article to the Greg's above. Measuring tokens, prompts, and similar, are poor indicators of adoption. Rather, focus on the workflows and metrics that matter to them. Of course, make sure to measure to the baseline measures first.
3. AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP by Steve Blank. Great reflection by Steve Blank. New AI tools allow such a rapid production of "products" (prototypes, really), that entrepreneurs are skipping making Minimum Viable Products (which, remember, could be anything from a story board or slide deck to a prototype). Thus, Steve concludes, the age of MVPs is over, and we are entering the era of Initial Untested Products. I do like the abrreviation because it stresses two very important things: initial and untested.
4. Lateral Thinking in Nature by Paul Sloane. In an age of unprecedented technological change, it is still very much worth it to pause, take a break, and observe nature. Paul shares examples of how cicadas, cuckoos, wood frogs, and African termites have adjusted to their environment. Truly, the world around us is an infinite spring of inspiration.
5. On Thinking Bigger by Bruno Pešec [subscriber exclusive]. Investing in innovation is risky, hence we must do what we can to grow the ideas as much as possible. Otherwise we are risking taking on the risk that will never justify the investment itself.

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