Luis Perez-Breva
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a ...
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Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.Less
Society celebrates innovation after the fact. It is a revisionist exercise, and little is said about how to innovate. Aspiring innovators are told to get a big idea and a team and build a show-and-tell for potential investors. But that conflates innovation, entrepreneurship, publicizing an idea, and fundraising; it does not clue aspiring innovators on how to begin. Innovating shows how actually to get started and innovate for impact and scale—a skill you can practice and master through learning. It is a doer’s approach for the explorers of our time, developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. It shows innovating does not require an earth-shattering idea; indeed, no thing is new at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. It takes only a hunch, and anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. The process is empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental: give a hunch the structure of a problem; use anything as a part; accrue other people’s knowledge and skills in the course of innovating; systematize what is learned; advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document. Questions outlined in the book help innovators think in new ways. It is even possible to create a kit for innovating.
Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.003.0002
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a ...
More
You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.Less
You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.
Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.003.0003
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
You can get started innovating right away: just assemble some parts you already have or can get easily; learn as you go; and use those parts to make your problem tangible. Anything can be a part: in ...
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You can get started innovating right away: just assemble some parts you already have or can get easily; learn as you go; and use those parts to make your problem tangible. Anything can be a part: in a corporate setting, that includes anything you currently do, assemble, or procure; and for everything else—from physical parts to services to resources for acquiring knowledge—there’s the Web. You bring parts together you’ve chosen so you can make any aspect of your problem tangible—even a solution—and you ask questions, reasoning about your problem with your minds and your hands. Parts will tell you what you need to assume at your current scale, what you aren’t seeing, what you are missing, and whether the next scale is even possible.Less
You can get started innovating right away: just assemble some parts you already have or can get easily; learn as you go; and use those parts to make your problem tangible. Anything can be a part: in a corporate setting, that includes anything you currently do, assemble, or procure; and for everything else—from physical parts to services to resources for acquiring knowledge—there’s the Web. You bring parts together you’ve chosen so you can make any aspect of your problem tangible—even a solution—and you ask questions, reasoning about your problem with your minds and your hands. Parts will tell you what you need to assume at your current scale, what you aren’t seeing, what you are missing, and whether the next scale is even possible.
Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035354
- eISBN:
- 9780262336680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035354.003.0010
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
Organizations don’t just grown on their own. You build them, and you may end up building multiple organizations, each one atop the previous one. The scale-up logic is straightforward: You present ...
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Organizations don’t just grown on their own. You build them, and you may end up building multiple organizations, each one atop the previous one. The scale-up logic is straightforward: You present what you did (the past) to motivate where you will go (the future), but what you work on is the middle (the present). Most emerging organizations fail because they build for the future having ignored the entire present. But you don’t have to worry about whether a decision is optimal for that rosy future—it just needs to work today. As you build the next organization, you’ll reuse parts from the old one and you’ll get to implement everything you’ve learned. Growth and scale-up work like problem solving: no one cares how you first came up with the solution. The organization that systematizes your current innovation prototype is your first big milestone.Less
Organizations don’t just grown on their own. You build them, and you may end up building multiple organizations, each one atop the previous one. The scale-up logic is straightforward: You present what you did (the past) to motivate where you will go (the future), but what you work on is the middle (the present). Most emerging organizations fail because they build for the future having ignored the entire present. But you don’t have to worry about whether a decision is optimal for that rosy future—it just needs to work today. As you build the next organization, you’ll reuse parts from the old one and you’ll get to implement everything you’ve learned. Growth and scale-up work like problem solving: no one cares how you first came up with the solution. The organization that systematizes your current innovation prototype is your first big milestone.
Michael C. Medlock
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198794844
- eISBN:
- 9780191836336
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0013
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Logic / Computer Science / Mathematical Philosophy, Computational Mathematics / Optimization
This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy and then definition of the RITE method. It then delves into the benefits of this method and provides practical notes on running RITE tests ...
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This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy and then definition of the RITE method. It then delves into the benefits of this method and provides practical notes on running RITE tests effectively. The chapter concludes with an overview of the original case study behind the 2002 article documenting this method.Less
This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy and then definition of the RITE method. It then delves into the benefits of this method and provides practical notes on running RITE tests effectively. The chapter concludes with an overview of the original case study behind the 2002 article documenting this method.
