Innovation here is higher-risk product discovery - the design of new mechanisms to extract value with low assurance that things will actually work well. The emp

Innovation here is higher-risk product discovery - the design of new mechanisms to extract value with low assurance that things will actually work well. The emphasis here is that managing innovation is explicitly about managing risk - methodically considering and communicating risk to stakeholders, "failing gracefully and fast". Egger from SAP references assessing budding products in terms of "desirability, feasibility, viability", which is a design thinking thing [0]. A win an innovation program is when you don't over commit to risk. You put some resources into a program, at some phase assess risk per some rubric, and go on the the next stage or not. He makes the point that in spite of having an innovation function, you want an innovation culture: "But what you really want to do is not have an innovation team. You just want to have people who are focused on willing difficult projects into existence, and de-risking those projects. And so in an ideal world, what a company, personally, what I believe it should strive towards is help the bigger organization to get good at product discovery themselves, and not lead innovation or be the “innovation office”, but rather then be the steward who helps to incorporate new methodologies and help them to get better at de-risking. " [0] https://designthinking.ideo.com/ https://designthinking.ideo.com/