Experiment log. Most experiments have limitations and flaws, and a detailed record can make it easier to address shortcomings after the fact. The experiment log is a spreadsheet with spaces for noting riskiest assumption and experimental methods as well as dates, times, participants, and results.

Part of your experimental effort should be devoted to segmenting the market, or verifying assumptions about who your most receptive customers will be.

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.

Beneath the managing directors, the innovation teams consist of three to five people likewise combining business, technical, and design backgrounds. Small teams can react quickly to market shifts and, as we’ve seen, they can accomplish as much or more than much larger teams of the past. They’re cross-functional groups that avoid the silos typical

As we saw in Strategy (Chapter 2), investment offers the lowest degree of control. As an investor, you’ll likely own well under 49 percent of the startup. You may be awarded a seat on the board of directors, but even in that case, your influence over the startup’s direction will be limited. And your potential upside will be correspondingly limited.

First, in any large organization, you need support from the very top.

Fourth, you need patient capital.

News Corp’s print properties have taken this route since June 2013, when the company spun out its more lucrative entertainment business (now called 21st Century Fox). The publishing behemoth that includes the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London set aside $20 million to incubate new products from scratch (the target number is 64). It hired

The key is a new corporate structure that we call an innovation colony. Like the economic and political colonies of previous centuries, an innovation colony is a settlement staffed by employees of the mother company, but it’s distant enough that the company’s traditional management practices are not in full effect.