Our Perspectives on New Business Growth, Innovation, & Strategy

Measuring innovation is a three-step discipline: clarify the scope you mean (a single project, a portfolio, or the capability to innovate), name its objective, then choose value metrics that fit. Financial return is only the most visible kind of value.

A platform strategy has to succeed as both a product and a platform. Evaluating it means testing an additional layer of platform-specific criteria, treating the decisive ones as pass-or-fail, and making sure your organization can actually carry it.

A great demo isn't enough. The user, the approver, security, and the admin each hire your product for a different job — and jobs-to-be-done that stops at the user is why deals stall.

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.