The eXtreme Innovation Manifesto

Behold the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto (XIM), a call to action based on a consultant's and an entrepreneur's experience watching and driving innovation.  In the next few posts, we will explain each principle and what it means for redirecting your innovation efforts.


Let's begin with Innovators over Ideas.  This is the most important principle in the Manifesto, because it challenges deeply-held innovation dogma.  Most corporate innovation efforts focus on generating ideas.  Hands up if the following rallying cries sound familiar: "We need more ideas!", "Where is the next $1,000,000 idea?".


The seductive theory is, find ideas and you find profits.  Full disclosure: as a consultant, I earn fees guiding large corporate teams to generate ideas, but I've learned the prosaic truth. The ratio of ideas in to profits out is highly unfavorable (you'll get used to my English understatement).


Instead, flip the quest to: "We need more innovators!".  Why?  Because the odds of success are way better.  Natural innovators, if you can find the few working for your company, and if you create the environment in which they can thrive, will:

• generate compelling, different ideas
• test the concept quickly and cheaply (more on this when we cover Pretotyping), and
• iterate rapidly as early feedback improves the idea.  

In the next post, we'll discuss finding and nurturing natural innovators.

Welcome to the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto

The basic recipe for innovation is well known: fresh perspectives and orthogonal thinking, a diverse team, rapid experimentation, prototyping, scale, and hire the blimp for the IPO party. What could be simpler?

As a 15-year veteran of corporate innovation and growth efforts, I've seen (and helped) this recipe get honed and optimized, and I'm deeply disappointed with the performance of the model. In conversations with successful entrepreneurs, most especially my collaborator Alberto Savoia of Google, I've become convinced that the model needs a fundamental refresh. Alberto and I have humbly summarized this approach as the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto, a powerful set of principles that challenge much of the received wisdom of how to extract maximum ROI from innovation.

We will share the Manifesto itself, examples of how the principles apply, learnings from XIM experiments underway at Google (oh, didn't I mention? Google is applying these ideas), and tools and metrics to help you liberate the innovators at your company.

So far, all I've offered is an uncommon impulse to include adverbs in my writing, but if that's enough incentive, I'd appreciate a follow of my Tweets at: @Emirger