How would you feel if your doctor told you to raise your tolerance for pain before trying a simple, reliable remedy to reduce it? That is the advice boards and executives routinely get about innovation: raise your risk tolerance. The diagnosis is wrong. Innovation is not inherently risky. The way most companies do customer discovery ...

Before You Build an MVP, Do MVD Nearly every senior executive, founder, and innovation professional knows the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP). Build the most basic version of a product idea, test it with customers, and learn. The idea endures because it promises to enable teams to test their assumptions about customers and ...

You Can’t Buy Innovation The most consistent finding across the fourteen annual Global Innovation 1000 studies of the world’s thousand biggest R&D spenders is one most executives still find hard to believe: there is no long-term correlation between what a company spends on innovation and its overall financial performance. In the study’s final year, 2018, ...

Customers Can Tell You What They Want, Just Not What to Build The Mississippi judge, law professor, and state representative Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr. gave a famous speech in 1952, If-By-Whiskey, when people were polarized about the prohibition of alcohol. He inspired me to speak my mind on another controversial topic today. “My friends, ...

Customer Outcomes Are the Constraint That Makes Your Team More Creative That headline runs against something most innovation teams take for granted: creativity needs freedom, and constraints kill it. The instinct to remove guardrails to enhance creativity shapes how many teams run brainstorming, structure workshops, and talk about innovation. That may seem reasonable for anyone ...

77% of AI’s Hardest Costs Are Invisible. The Most Expensive One Comes Before You Start. What Stanford Found Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab spent five months interviewing executives at 41 organizations to document 51 enterprise AI deployments that delivered measurable value. The Enterprise AI Playbook, published in April 2026 by Pereira, Graylin, and Brynjolfsson, reports that ...

The Hidden Reason Innovation Failure Rates Have Not Improved in 30 Years Retired venture investor Jerry Neumann recently published an essay in the online publication Colossus titled “We Have Learned Nothing.” His argument is direct: after thirty years of startup methodology, failure rates have not improved. Customer development, Design Thinking, the Business Model Canvas, Lean ...

The Hidden Reason Innovation Feels Riskier Than It Should Most leadership teams can recognize this moment. A strategy offsite ends with a long list of initiatives everyone agrees are “promising.” The discussion was thoughtful. The data was solid. The energy in the room was high. Yet when the team reconvenes weeks later, momentum has evaporated. ...