Innovation

Taking on risky, audacious projects require us to first challenge the hardest parts - facing the possible failure points with enthusiastic skepticism, and making the visions more concrete.

"Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to solve the world's biggest problems through experimental projects like balloon-powered Internet and wind turbines that sail through the air. Find out X's secret to creating an organization where people feel comfortable working on big, risky projects and exploring audacious ideas.

Thomas Edison greatest innovation was to bring together the brightest minds to collaborate, exchange ideas, and work in creative ways to solve problems.

The master stroke of Edison was he brought together some of the brightest minds to collaborate, exchange ideas, and work in creative ways to change the world as we knew it. In this podcast episode, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite journeys to late-19th century Menlo Park, where a team of unsung heroes is hard at work setting up an electricity grid that could light up a New York city block. There's a lot at stake: financial ruin, countless hours of labor, and Edison's very reputation.

Reframing the central challenge of innovation as a question not of skill or technology, but of market demand - and validating your strategies with "pretotyping".

As Google’s first engineering director, Alberto Savoia led the team that launched Google’s revolutionary AdWords project. After founding two startups, he returned to Google in 2008 and he assumed the role of “Innovation Agitator,” developing trainings and workshops to catalyze smart, impactful creation within the company. Drawing on his book "The Right It," he begins with the premise that at least 80 percent of innovations fail, even if competently executed. He discusses how to reframe the central challenge of innovation as a question not of skill or technology, but of market demand: Will anyone actually care? Savoia shares strategies for winning the fight against failure, by using a rapid-prototyping technique he calls “pretotyping.”

Discover, prioritize and capitalize on opportunities for growth.

Identifying "jobs-to-be-done" vastly improves an organization's ability to produce solutions that fit customer needs, but putting it into practice often proves difficult. Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI), as explained in detail by its creator Tony Ulwick, is a way to put jobs-to-be-done into practice. You will learn to define their customers’ needs with the rigor, precision, and discipline.

An innovation management best practice through a case study.

Because innovation requires heavy investment and no leader can pick a winner on day one, Alexander Osterwalder argues that companies need to take a portfolio approach that involves making many small bets, tracking progress via key metrics and increasing investments only in those ideas that show evidence of traction. They should therefore think of their business as two distinct but connected portfolios - one for exploration and another for exploitation.