The Lean Enterprise

Beyond that, great ideas arise from inspiration. A personal experience may call attention to a problem that needs solving.

Second, you must have the ability and organizational support needed to build unique structures, say, to start a new company or form a joint venture with one of your biggest competitors.

Learnings report. At the end of an experiment, take time to analyze and record the most important lessons learned: key insights, discoveries, surprises, and the like.

If corporate innovators must wait for funding, approval, or attention from specialized departments, they’ll be fighting with both hands tied behind their back. You must empower them to do anything necessary to continue learning what customers want until they have it. This is a bitter pill for many enterprises to swallow. What about protecting the b

An important part of setting success criteria is limiting the time spent. This makes sense if you think about success criteria in terms of opportunity cost; the more time it takes to complete an experiment, the higher the cost.

First of all, skunkworks lend themselves to slow waterfall-style development, and lessons learned don’t make their way back to the company as a whole, because of their secrecy. They can be an effective way to accomplish specific goals, but insufficient to ensure corporate survival amid unpredictable market shifts and rapidly mounting competition.

By acquiring early and nurturing the acquisition’s inherent strengths, you’re maximizing both control and momentum. You take full ownership with all the upside and other benefits that implies. The prospect for growth is higher than with either incubating or investing because the startup has already eliminated a degree of uncertainty, and you can ex

Think of the options as a matrix bounded by control and momentum. Corporations can claim varying degrees of control (the less corporate control, the greater the potential upside) and they can tap into startups at various stages of momentum to adjust market risk (the more momentum, the lower the risk). This scheme yields three strategies: incubation

Creating innovative products from scratch benefits the enterprise as a whole by making all your employees feel innovative. It confers a sense of pride and passion that business as usual can