Why Breakthrough Innovation Requires Systematic Discovery, Not Creative Genius Why Breakthrough Innovation Requires Systematic Discovery Not Creative Genius Memory expert Jim Kwik says: “There’s no such thing as a good or bad memory; just a trained or untrained memory.” The same applies to innovation: There’s no such thing as creative or uncreative teams; just trained ...

The Hidden Reason Teams Can’t Learn Why Their Products Fail The Meeting They Keep Having The product launched six months ago, burned through $4M in development, and significantly underperformed projections. The portfolio review meeting is running two hours over. Leadership needs to decide: kill it, pivot, or double down on a redesign? Design has data ...

The Real Reason AI Product-Market Fit Is So Fragile Elena Verna, Growth Leader at Lovable, an AI-native company that has reportedly reached $200M ARR, recently described what she calls a “product-market fit treadmill.” Her point is stark. Even companies with strong traction can feel like they are running just to stay in place. According to ...

Innovation Myopia: Why Customer-Focused Companies Still Miss Breakthroughs Last time, I wrote about why companies that have more operational knowledge than ever still make poor innovation bets. Today, I want to show you the pattern that causes this, a pattern so common it deserves its own name: Innovation Myopia. Most companies know a lot about ...

Why Successful Companies Make Bad Innovation Bets Here’s something I see repeatedly: companies that excel at operations still make poor innovation bets. It’s not a competence problem. It’s a data problem. They have delivery knowledge in abundance. What they lack is jobs-and-outcomes knowledge. And that gap is where market risk lives. The Blind Spot in ...

Two Kinds of Creative Conviction: One Expresses Truth, the Other Discovers It A few days ago, someone challenged me about the American record producer Rick Rubin’s philosophy that creators should “make what they love and not worry about the audience.” I’ve seen people on LinkedIn espousing this for product innovation, too, encouraging people to forget ...

The Hidden Flaw in Customer Focus That Stalls Growth Every year, companies pour billions into innovation. And every year, much of that investment is wasted. Not because leaders lack intelligence or resources, but because they are looking through the wrong lens. They look at customers as suppliers delivering products or services, rather than as consumers ...

What a $200B Fund Manager Teaches Us About Innovation Howard Marks is one of the most respected investors of our time. His memos are studied by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and countless professionals who want to understand markets at a deeper level. What sets Marks apart is not his ability to find spectacular winners, but ...

Why AI Makes Jobs-to-Be-Done More Critical, Not Less As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms how organizations generate and test ideas, many innovation professionals are asking: Is the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) approach still necessary? Some believe that, with AI’s ability to process massive data and surface new concepts, traditional discovery can be skipped. Yet the evidence and practice ...