Launch p2: Systematized Innovation
“My reputation grows with every failure.”
Some words carry a mystique that makes them feel inaccessible. Whereas anybody can be “creative”, innovation is sometimes wielded like a sword that hath been bequeathed upon thy enlightened ones. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty cool to create something out of nothing and see people take joy in it, but innovation takes real work. What makes it complex is that it lives somewhere in the realm between art and science. For as much as corporations would like to reduce it to STEM, it’s likely more of a STEAM. And although it can’t be modeled down to a formula, there are methodologies to enable it.
Let’s be honest, most ideas are doomed to failure. When you commit to innovation you are implicitly accepting failure – time and time again. By systematizing your approach to innovation, however, you are (1) trying to reduce the total number of failures, (2) reducing the total cost of each failure, and (3) creating a learning feedback loop that course-corrects away from noise and toward signal. Some people in startups talk about “embracing failure”. I don’t know. To me, each failure feels like a punch to the gut. But there’s a difference between taking an errant jab from my 3 year old son as opposed to absorbing a kidney punch from a professional boxer. Embracing failure to me simply means reducing the sting that each blow can land. This way I stand a chance at going the distance instead of writhing in pain with my intestines rearranged.
Assume that you are going to fail before you succeed. Minimize the pain of each failure and iterate, iterate, iterate until you start honing in on the signals that you are looking for. Here are a few concepts to consider as you embark on your journey.
Mission [Im]Possible – Who Cares?
Let’s begin with the obvious: “Necessity is the mother of invention”. When Plato [loosely] coined it in 375 BC he was writing about justice, but it holds true in every area of innovation, whether you’re devising political theory or launching an app. At the root of innovation is a fundamental need. The need may be obvious, such as a cure for cancer, or it may be a bit blurry and in need of a good squint, such as our “need” for automobiles and smartphones. The important thing to consider is that for an innovation to succeed it has to address an urgent, immediate, and pervasive need. In the case of automobiles and smartphones, one might argue that nobody knew that they needed them before they existed, but by squinting we could recognize that everybody would need faster transportation and easier access to information and communication. What’s important is that you know what fundamental need you’re addressing. Who’s your market? What’s your purpose? Why do you exist? Why should anybody care? I’m not trying to get philosophical, but it’s crucial to have a mission that addresses a meaningful need, and then to clearly see the connection between your creative activities and your mission. When thinking about the dwindling lifespan of public companies (Figure 2), it’s important to note that the causes are multifactorial, ranging from the disruption from technological innovation to increased globalization and competition to outdated governance structures, inertia and institutional myopia. It’s the latter that we have the most control over, and yet it’s so easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The forest is the mission, which should be directed toward a fundamental need in your industry. That’s not to say that your mission shouldn’t evolve over time as society changes, but there are plenty of cases where companies lost sight of what made them impactful in the first place. I’m certain that Kodak had plenty of justification for protecting their film business in 1975 when Steven Sasson helped them invent the first handheld digital camera, but their institutional myopia misconstrued their purpose for existing as being in the industry of selling film instead of the industry of capturing memories. There are plenty of other stories where companies lost sight of – or never understood – what drove their initial success, so I won’t recount them here but knowing, truly knowing, what fundamental itch you scratch is paramount.
What can evolution teach us about corporate missions? Well, if survival is reserved for the fittest and most capable in acquiring resources and producing offspring to carry the lineage, then your mission should articulate how you will do that. Even a tiger has a mission statement:
"To protect and sustain my territory, hunt with stealth and precision, and ensure the survival and growth of my lineage, all while embodying strength, independence, and resilience in the wild."
I’d bet that any species in the Panthera genus that couldn’t deliver on this mission isn’t around today to tell us about it. Deviating from your mission is a dangerous gambit. It should go without saying that your mission should not only embody your purpose for existing, but it should also have connections to what distinguishes you from the competition – that which makes you fitter than others competing for the same resources. Even tigers will struggle their way to extinction should their habitat change or they lose their ability to deliver on their mission (such as tigers that get injured or are raised in captivity). As a company, you need to know why you are viable, what itch you scratch, and why existence should favor you over others.
If we rewind back to the concept of innovation, then some of the fuzziness starts getting clearer when we realize that our initiatives should have a line of sight to our mission. The process of innovation is inherently risky. It’s as risky to try to create a new product line as it is for an ape to eat an unrecognizable fruit. It might work out for the better. It might not. Odds are that it won’t. But if it looks a lot like a banana then it’s more likely that it is digestible and not poisonous. And even if that newly discovered fruit is delicious, that ape had better consider the stakes in reaching for a resource that could be driving fierce competitive forces on species that are perfectly adapted to win at all costs.
Staying in our lane reduces some risks when that lane is aligned with a significant need. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t consider adjacent lanes, but we should be aware of the new risks that arise when we begin deviating from our purpose and competitive fitness. Even when there is intense pressure to change lanes, such as pressures created by new disruptive technologies, we are well-advised to think hard about how we will effectively compete for resources in a foreign habitat when we were not designed for that environment. Even tigers have a non-zero chance of surviving in a new habitat, but there’s a difference between a tiger adapting to a swamp as opposed to, say, the ocean. Be intentional about it and understand what you’re getting into.
For the sake of this article, let us assume that we have a motivating, empowering, and forward-looking mission that addresses a fundamental need (pivots are for a different discussion), then how does that mission direct innovation? For starters, it defines our target customer. By knowing our target customer we likely have access to that customer and can talk to them. We can better understand their needs, the nuances of what they are trying to accomplish, and what they are willing to spend money on. We also understand the ecosystem in which they exist, which means that we stand a better chance at designing a solution that addresses their regulations, procurement process, integration requirements, messaging, purchase patterns, etc etc etc. If our customer is a consumer, then we need to know how we’ll discover each other and what alternatives they have to buying our product. If they’re an enterprise then we need to be clear who the buyers are, meaning that there are likely economic buyers, functional buyers, and technical buyers who all need to be convinced that you’re the right solution for them. Don’t forget switching costs, and don’t underestimate entrenched internal stakeholders with vested interests. And don’t forget that customers aren’t the only people that need convincing. If you’re in a company that’s larger than 1 person then you will need to convince others that this is a worthwhile endeavor. You’ll encounter far less resistance if your opportunity aligns with the corporate mission and builds on organizational strengths.
The list of considerations is extensive, but hopefully this conveys the importance of knowing your lane. You are fitter and far better adapted to navigating these innovation obstacles if you have a fighting chance at addressing these issues. By being in that lane we can now hack the discovery process by virtue of “givens” that are at our disposal that could otherwise sink naive entrants. Not to mention that by being in our lane, and having ongoing dialogue with our target audience, it means that we are more likely to spot unaddressed or emerging needs that will expand our impact.
To be clear, staying in our lane does not imply that we should be a one-trick pony. Lanes can be narrow and they can be wide. Google’s lane has been “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful“. That’s pretty damn wide. They’ve certainly crushed it over the past two decades, and when they ventured far from that lane results have been mixed. It’s also worth noting how even Google is now fiercely trying to cope with the very habitat change that they helped create with the emergence of artificial intelligence. Google has been a pioneer in this space, in both building the infrastructure to make it possible and also developing the science to make it functional, but all of that also pave the way for new entrants (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to leapfrog into Google’s lane and launch disruptive products that threaten Google’s competitiveness in a space that they have long dominated. It’s not like companies haven’t tried to dethrone Google in the search space before, but Google’s technology was better and their lead too big for others to catch up. AI, on the other hand, has been a game changer — a tectonic shift — that has redefined the field. And Google is now playing catch-up.
(Ugh — I was going to keep this point about Google brief, but the more that I get into it the more that I feel that some things are worth noting) Something else to keep in mind regarding Google’s predicament is that inertia and the innovator’s dilemma might have also factored into Google losing the lead in AI. As the industry leader, Google has responsibilities. They have responsibilities to users to return reliable search results, and they have responsibilities to their shareholders to keep optimizing economical returns. Google’s market cap is over $2T — the pressures to keep that train moving are unimaginable. These things, among others, likely also played a role in how quickly Google could push out their own AI technologies (Gemini). For starters, they had to think about how to do so without disrupting their core search business, but they also had to do it in a way that was responsible and didn’t lead to harm (ie hallucinations). Google has expectations. Startups, on the other hand, had no core business to disrupt, and had far fewer concerns in launching things that would break. They had mostly upside to getting out there fast, fierce, and unrelenting. It’s not fair, but neither is evolution, so let’s move on.
I could go on about this, but then I’d be writing a book, not an article. Next, we’ll be looking at how culture and methodologies affect your adaptive efforts, and how you might want to think about optimizing your own systematized innovation.
