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A Simple Map for Innovation at Scale

Creative destruction — where the old replaces the new — is inevitable in any industry, it’s only a matter of when. Few companies make the transition.

Are these the real problems?

  • Deeply understand the problems — who are the customers, internal stakeholders (sales, other departments), and beneficiaries (shareholders, etc.)? How do you adjudicate between them, priority of the solution, timing of the solutions, minimum feature set, dependencies, etc.
  • Figure out whether the problem is a symptom of something more important
  • Understand whether the problem is immediately solvable, requires multiple minimum viable products to test several solutions, or needs more R&D

Give the Topic Areas a Common Framework

Lessons Learned

  • Creative destruction and disruption will happen to every company. How will you respond?
  • Topic action teams need to deeply understand the problems as the customer understands them, not just what the corporate strategy requirements dictate. This can’t be done without talking directly to the customers, internal stakeholders, and partners.
  • Consider if the corporate strategy team should act more as facilitators than as gatekeepers.
  • A light-weight way to keep topic teams in sync with corporate strategy is to offer a common innovation language and problem and solution framework.
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