Skip the “solution” fields for now. Instead, have everyone on the team write down five assumptions that must hold true for the problem to be valid.

That said, there’s no reason why startups incubated internally can’t explode into the market and grow faster and bigger than investments or acquisitions. They just take more effort to get off the ground.

For that matter, any startup that’s approaching the end of its runway is a viable acqui-hire. The team has learned hard lessons in what not to do, and they can bring that experience to bear in developing products on your behalf. In fact, failed startups are often acqui-hired by Facebook, Google, and other Silicon Valley giants hungry for talent.

How Do You Think About Staffing for Innovation? There are only five on Beth’s team.

Given the unpredictability of these market trends, the only sensible approach is to embrace uncertainty and build your strategy around it. Your efforts must be geared toward relentless experimentation so that you can discover opportunities as soon as they emerge.

Some companies spur employees to come up with new ideas by offering so-called 20 percent time. However, we believe that an open door to the corporate incubator with a promise of sharing in the upside gives workers a far greater incentive.

At this point, the third enterprise innovation strategy comes into play: Invest when you can’t acquire. Face it, the next Facebook is not going to let an enterprise buy it wholesale. But it may be happy to take your money, and the investment can bring significant advantages in terms of both return and partnership down the line. Meanwhile, a

It’s helpful to document your progress in testing ideas from conception to completion. At Lean Startup Machine, we’ve adopted three simple forms that keep team members on the same page and simplify backtracking and problem solving if anything goes awry.

try to describe people who share a common activity, goal, or problem that would make them receptive to your offering, such as “people who live in urban areas and play basketball in their spare time.