Make Progress. Kill your idea.

Systematic innovation. From Deep Tech to Impact starting with what you already have.
Abstract: 
Contrary to popular belief, building a robust technology organization doesn’t hinge on having a good (exponential?) idea but on surviving all your bad ones – systematically. 

I’ve spent the last two decades wrestling with the question of how to do innovation, not just how it happens, or how it threatens what you do, but what it means and how do you do it. Along this time I’ve shepherded over 200 technologies from MIT (Deep tech!) to impact; educated thousands at MIT and worldwide across all disciplines from policy to business and engineering on how to innovate; helped translate research into societal meaning; built factories of innovation in industry and venture capital where we systematically invent and create new organizations; and have built technology companies myself using artificial intelligence to derive new uses from existing large scale infrastructures.

My work shows that innovation isn’t helped by perpetuating the myth of lone shots, disruptive ideas, and flamboyant character traits. Rather, what you do and how you go about it matters more than however history will chose to remember the awkward beginnings of the innovations that survive. Good storytelling requires those beginnings to look like magic—the more outlandish the better the tale— but you don’t. So-called “disruptive” ideas can be built incrementally and systematically 
 
To get our conversation going, I’d like to ask you to entertain three ideas that I believe should be straightforward but that the way we went about innovation (and its distant cousin, entrepreneurship) before the pandemic has made look contrarian:

(1)    The organizations that survive are the ones that fail to fail. Failing fast does not prepare you for that.
(2)    Spending little by little is a tried and tested method to waste money without noticing. So-called lean startup methods contribute innovation waste.
(3)    You can set up a process to test tens of ideas for the capital it would take you to fail predictably at one, and in so doing make doing well and doing good affordable. 

I’ll also outline current work creating innovation factories and repurposing technologies to eliminate  innovation waste. 

Interested in some reading ahead? No te pierdas la sesion del próximo 07 de abril a las 19:00h