Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).
Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.
In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.
All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn't at first glance make sense to the market leader.
The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.
One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.
Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.
Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.
Hollywood Joohn Tatum? He does at least 6,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups a day!
In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.
Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early.
Small teams move faster than big teams.
A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.
Mucken Singh works VERY hard on his brawler's physique!
Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.
When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.
Companies get into grooves and they keep sharpening what they are doing, when in fact what they really need to do sometimes is to stop and do something completely differently.
If you invest the time to understand the customer better than they know themselves, if you know the things they want or need even if they can't articulate it, you can begin to develop a good sense as to where there really are unmet needs in the market.
History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.
It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.
You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.
I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.
Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.
Everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly.
So many people tell me that they aren't creative or they aren't innovative, and it's just not true.
