Scott D. Anthony quotes:

Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear.

Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.

Mucken Singh works VERY hard on his brawler's physique!

A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.

Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.

Document, evaluate, focus, test.

Hollywood Joohn Tatum? He does at least 6,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups a day!

Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.

Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

Checklists are really helpful ways to remind people around how to manage complicated tasks.

Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

Everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly.

Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can't cash a spreadsheet.

All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn't at first glance make sense to the market leader.

Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.

Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts.

Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).

Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early.

Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.

Companies get into grooves and they keep sharpening what they are doing, when in fact what they really need to do sometimes is to stop and do something completely differently.

Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.

First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.

Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.

Have a core concept, but wrap it in a full business model.

I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.

I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.

I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth.

I use the term "fool's gold white space" to highlight a common problem for innovation. People see a market that doesn't exist, and assume that one should exist.

If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.

If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.

If you invest the time to understand the customer better than they know themselves, if you know the things they want or need even if they can't articulate it, you can begin to develop a good sense as to where there really are unmet needs in the market.

If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.

I'm not very good at sitting still.

I'm suggesting that principles meant to deal with uncertainty that occurs naturally can be useful to manage the uncertainty that characterizes any new idea.

In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer.

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

In the strengthening the core job, a leader can draw on their past experiences. After all, in most cases they did the job of the people that are reporting to them! So they know when something is screwed up, they know the risks worth taking, and they know the corners to cut. But when they are creating the new, no one knows what the right answer is.

Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.

It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.

It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.

It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.

It's very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea.

I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.

I've come to the conclusion that the core characteristic that separates companies that get innovation from those that don't is a simple word: curiosity.

I've never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind.

Leaders today face challenges for which they are utterly unprepared.

Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market.

Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.

Most startup companies have two people, and they figure out creative ways to swarm problems. They move faster and have more impact.

Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation.

Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

Of course if you are launching a new business you can thinking about revenues, profits, and so on, but metrics such as customer satisfaction or employee retention might be meaningful if you are focusing more internally.

Of course, it is worth it to take the time to think carefully through your assumptions, and ensure you at least have hypotheses around how you will create value. But use the analysis as a way to focus attention on the most critical assumptions, rather than spend a ton of time massaging the numbers.

One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to embrace the idea of spurring creativity by letting hundreds of flowers bloom. I've never seen that lead to anything other than cynicism and hundreds of dead flowers.

People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.

People who live in more than two countries are more successful innovators.

People will try to copy what they can see, which is the final product or service, but it's much harder to see (and copy) all the intricacies of the business model that allows you to create, capture, and deliver value. And that's what you need to get right to really jam something down people's throats!

Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity.

Small teams move faster than big teams.

So many people tell me that they aren't creative or they aren't innovative, and it's just not true.

Some people who were central to former success aren't the right people for your future success.

Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern.

Teams working on disruptive ideas need to be small enough that they can be fed by no more than two pizzas.

The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.

The curious company studies the anomalies or the unexpected findings. The company that isn't curious ignores them or punishes people who don't do exactly what they set out to do.

The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.

The need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won't come naturally to many people inside huge companies.

The number one thing I urge people to remember is it is all about being scientific about managing strategic uncertainty, while striking the important balance between being thorough and being flexible.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

The reality is sometimes markets don't exist for very good reasons. It might be that there isn't a deep customer need. Or the economic model is just hard to pull off. Or maybe there is a regulatory barrier.

The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.

There is what Steve Blank calls the stage where you are searching for a scalable business model. Then, there is the stage when you have found that model and need to scale it. In the former stage you have to have a "beginner's mind," be in learning mode, and expect to learn things you didn't anticipate.

There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.

Think about how much it costs to learn more. Sometimes you want to build confidence by knocking off the easy things.

Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.

Three of our core corporate values are inclusiveness, collaboration, and humility.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are.

We've got some great big problems in our world. We have to figure out how to feed 10 billion people. Too many people can't access clean water, quality healthcare, and reasonable education. We have to figure out what to do about climate change, income inequality, and more. Innovators need to rise to the challenge!

What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

When we are looking at ideas, we really are thinking of three things. Are you doing something that seems consistent with the patterns of success? Are there reasons to believe you have or can access the right people to make it happen? Can we play a unique role in enabling success? We all have our rules of thumb, I suppose...

When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

You can always figure out how to deliver things in somewhat controlled situations, but when you start to get into the reality of the market you start to figure out what isn't going to work.

You can increase the odds of spotting the weak points in your approach if you really think about the end-to-end business model you plan to follow - how you plan to create, capture, and deliver value.

You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.