Our Perspectives on New Business Growth, Innovation, & Strategy

Every founder has built the '1% of a $40B market' slide. Why that one line tanks your credibility in the room, and how to build a market size you can actually defend.

Managing a platform is a different discipline from managing a product: you cultivate an evolving system of use and a complementor ecosystem so value compounds with adoption. Different levers, different signals, and a flywheel to protect from your own product reflexes.

Ideas submitted, experiments run, launches shipped — activity metrics matter, but on their own they can't tell you whether your organization can actually turn ideas into growth. Activity isn't capability. A better question, and a quick way to see where your gap is.

The advice to abandon home-grown innovation and shift to corporate venture capital and acquisitions gets the diagnosis right and the prescription wrong. CVC's value-capture path is usually undefined, and acquisitions just make the same structural problems more expensive. The real question isn't build versus buy — it's whether you've fixed the strategy, metrics, and Company-Fit (RPP) problems underneath. Fix those, and you can do both well.

A platform strategy isn't one decision — it's a hypothesis built from seven interlocking elements. Five define the platform (system of use, critical mass, complementors, value capture, competing platforms); two decide whether your organization can run it (architecture–business-model co-design, and Company Fit). Here's what each one means, and why skipping any of them stalls the whole play.

Some organizations run every ritual — sprints, idea portals, demo days — and still ship nothing that matters. That's innovation theater: strong innovation discipline sitting on weak organizational conditions. Here's why it's so hard to see from the inside, and the more honest question to ask.

Stopping a new business or innovation idea isn't failure: it's one of four disciplined outcomes, and the skill is knowing when. The short answer: stop when the evidence on the assumptions that matter most fails to clear the bar you set in advance, and you've run out of affordable ways to move it. A practical guide to evidence-based stopping, the Stop/Pause/Pivot distinction, and the signals that should trigger the call.

Two very different strategies hide under the word "platform" — one pays off in operating efficiency, the other compounds with adoption into market share and durable barriers. Here's how to tell them apart, why the compounding kind is so powerful, and why so few companies succeed at it.

Budget, leadership, smart people, plenty of ideas — and still no growth. Often the missing piece isn't culture or funding; it's a disciplined method for deciding which ideas to back and how to advance them. And of everything that makes an organization able to innovate, method is the most buildable.

Innovation gets stretched until it means everything and nothing. The fix is to classify it — by Type (market-facing vs. operational) and by Scope (Sustaining, Incremental, Disruptive). Classification is the first governance decision you make: it sets the risk profile, the RPP fit, and the criteria each kind of innovation should be judged against — and getting it wrong is how transformative bets quietly die.