The Innovation Flywheel I - A Framework
After spending a decade creating transformative bets myself and advising teams to prepare for this "billion dollar question", I am sharing my reflections of what delivers effective innovation in the next series of essays.
Putting customers front and center (aka customer obsession) fuels a virtuous cycle to create long-lasting businesses (see Amazon's Fly Wheel). A parallel flywheel exists for innovating new business ventures, where putting talent front and center fuels a virtuous cycle to encourage risk-taking, increase learning velocity, and boost chances of commercial success.
The Innovation Flywheel that puts people front and center
Innovation Flywheel, Explained
Attract and retain top talent
The most critical asset to successful innovation is not the ideas but the people behind these ideas. Attract hungry boundary pushers, retain them with an emotionally safe environment to invent, celebrate learnings from successful and failed attempts, and organizations will see a higher chance of success and cultivate a known brand of innovation that will attract talents.
Cultivate rigorous curiosity
Asking the right question is half the work of innovation. Successful innovation groups institutionalize risk-taking by adapting success metrics to focus on input metrics and performance framework that rewards process.
Discover meaningful problems by our customers
Rigorous customer research and quantitative concept testing assess problem-solution fits and predict product-market fit. This step is vital for the team to build conviction: a top-down vision mandate can only go so far.
Identify creative solutions with top engineering and GTM approaches
"How we build the product" and "how we bring it to our customers" are two big questions of equal weight. Many tech teams already have top-caliber engineering talent - an unfair advantage, and tend not to give the latter half of the equation sufficient mind space.
Celebrate learning to achieve a higher chance for PMF
A well-greased innovation flywheel will develop many bets, many of which will not reach commercial success. Instead of focusing only on the funded bets, effective innovation organizations index the learnings from the failed attempts to fine-tune their operation, customer learning, and business practices to increase the future chance of PMF.
