How to find it outside In a company with over 60,000 employees, there is for sure an abundance of innovative solutions for clearly defined business/customer problems. In some cases, innovation sessions can help to generate new ideas by tapping into the collective capacity for innovation. Still, it may not be smart to limit the generation of innovative ideas to our own employees only. After all, many of the smart people in the world do not work for one specific company. It is also important to be open to learn from other companies. A few examples of how we got inspiration from outside the company: Lectures. We invited or visited experts…

The use of a Reverse Income Statement Experiments, e.g. in medical research and development, are based on inspiration, developed ideas and targeted investments. Many do not deliver a successful outcome or solution. This is also the case for commercial innovation experiments. An innovation-championing senior business leader asked me to help his teams identify those commercial innovation experiments that would potentially provide the highest positive return. He was looking for an easy to use tool to help innovators, a tool simple enough not to discourage his passionate innovators. Based on the Discovery-Driven Growth* work from Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan, we developed a simplified “Reverse Income Statement” template. It’s a tool…